By bg1 on

I have been searching for information on using web services with Drupal (mostly having Drupal be the consumer of web services on a remote host) without luck.

I found a number of other questions about Drupal and Web Services and the most common characteristic is that there are no replies.

I see Drupal as a great front-end to remote applications (in other words, the real application data is not in Drupal but rather on some server somewhere else in the world). This however, requires Drupal to link views and forms to the remote databases. It seems to me that the best way to do that would be via web services.

Can anyone point me to some information on how to link views and forms to remote web services (or tell me why there does not appear to be much interest in using Drupal as front end to remote databases).

Thanks in advance?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

start with the services.module and I believe there are groups dedicated to this subect on groups.drupal.org

bg1’s picture

bg1 commented

Thanks for the response. I will check out the groups for this subject.

The Services module seems focused on Drupal as the web services server rather than the clinet/consumer. I am looking for an example where Drupal can be a front end for a remote application (e.g. ERP).

vm’s picture

vm commented

have you investigated the erp.module?

bg1’s picture

bg1 commented

Thanks, but there are huge numbers of businesses who already have back end applications and need only integration to make it easier for users to interact with the back end data.

No one is going to replace their legacy ERP system (and that is only an example) to recreate that functionality inside a system like Drupal (especially since a good ERP system consists of thousands of application-specific modules).

I am looking for a generic way to either join remote data with local Drupal data (a la LinQ) or to have a External-View module that allows one to build a view that consumes XML or the like from a remote source. (Going a step further the ability to perform all CRUD type functions against remote data sources using XML via web services or the like.)

Thanks again.

vm’s picture

vm commented

understood. I was pointing out modules to give an idea of where one would possibly look for direction in code.

Views.module is another module that may want to be investigated for pulling data from a database.

Beyond that, writing custom querries and using drupal's php input format is also a method to investigate.