Whenever an entry is executed in the ITP Model, the XML WebServices Connection will either extract data from an earlier collected XML structure or the DataManager will send an HTTP request through an URL. The HostName, Port an URI from which this URL is composed can be configured in the connection configuration file. The name and location of the connection configuration file is specified at the setting ITPDMINIFILE= in the ITP configuration file. The value of this setting is the name of a file. The connection configuration file is called the DataManager ini file or Dm.ini file. You can change the contents of the Dm.ini file with the ITP Administration Program by selecting Connection configuration.
If UserId and Password are set, each request will automatically include Basic Access Authentification information as described in RFC 2617 (HTTP Authentification: Basic and Digest Access Authentification).
A template for the content of the HTTP message and a template for its headers can be specified. The latter will only be necessary if special, custom HTTP headers are needed or standard HTTP headers that are not (fully) supported.
If a content template is specified, the content type of the HTTP message needs to be specified as well.
The XML WebServices Connection can easily include error information by means of an error tag that can be specified in the connection configuration file.
Normally the XML WebServices Connection complains about fields that are defined in the DID, but are not present in the XML record. The main reason to do so is to avoid errors. It is less error-prone to explicitly incorporate empty fields in an XML file, than allowing them to be absent, as this increases the risk that a field gets ignored just because one has used the wrong tag name in the DID. If you set the AllowMissingFields option, ITP ignores fields that have been specified in the DID but do not occur in the selected XML file. Use the special DATABASE_FIELD specification *PRESENT to make a distinction in a model between missing elements and elements that are present in the XML file, but empty.
The XML File connection will resolve namespace prefixes from tags and attributes and validate them against the namespace declarations in the active scope. This support is required to be able to match fields and entries based on namespaces. If this option is disabled namespace prefixes are ignored and considered to be part of the xml tag.
The format of numerical data that is stored in the XML file may vary for different countries. Several settings in the DataManager ini file allow you to determine the layout of the thousand separator and the decimal point.
By default, XML files use an UTF-8 encoding. If another encoding is used, the file should normally contain a prologue that specifies this encoding. The XML WebServices Connection allows a default encoding to be specified via an XMLFile.Encoding.Default setting. In this way files without a prologue can use a encoding different than UTF-8. Note that such a file may not be readable by ordinary XML processors, so this setting must be used with care.