best way to consume a webservice in an asp.net code behind

Question

Hello,

I'm trying to bind a datasource to a repeater, for instance, to a web service (.asmx from a different website) on page load. The webservice returns a DataSet from an sql call. What is the best way to go about doing this?

Answer 1

Call the webservice, take the result, and bind it to your repeater.

If you can, you might also try to cache the information for a time on your side, if possible to help with overall performance.

Answer 2

Because you're calling another website, you have to contend with two issues (especially if this web service is on somebody else's website or over the public internet). First, there might be a delay to retrieve the data from the other website. Second, the other website might timeout.

At a minimum you should consider an asychronous page request. As this MSDN article states:

If a synchronous request becomes I/O bound—for example, if it calls out to a remote Web service or queries a remote database and waits for the call to come back—then the thread assigned to the request is stuck doing nothing until the call returns. That impedes scalability because the thread pool has a finite number of threads available. If all request-processing threads are blocked waiting for I/O operations to complete, additional requests get queued up waiting for threads to be free. At best, throughput decreases because requests wait longer to be processed. At worst, the queue fills up and ASP.NET fails subsequent requests with 503 "Server Unavailable" errors.

But the best solution is probably to use AJAX. Load the page then make an ajax request to fill the repeater. That way you can have the nice "spinning" graphic or something else happening while you are waiting on the webservice.