Supplying Web Service Method Arguments
A Report Server Web service method sends a request to the service at a given URL using SOAP over HTTP. The service receives the request, processes it, and then returns a response. These requests and responses are in the form of XML documents.
Optional Parameters
In some cases, a Web service method can have optional input parameters. Even if an input parameter for a Web service method is optional, you must still include it and set the parameter value to null (Nothing in Visual Basic). Setting a parameter value to null sets the element value for that parameter in the SOAP request to null.
The following example uses the CreateFolder method to create a new folder named Product Sales in the Sales folder. By supplying a null value for the folder properties, no user-specific properties are supplied for the folder:
// C#
rs.CreateFolder("Product Sales", "/Sales", null);
Complex Data Types
The core class of the Report Server Web service is ReportingService2010, which you use to invoke the SOAP operations or Web methods of the proxy class. To support this class and its methods, Reporting Services includes user-defined, complex data types that are specific to the input and output parameters of the Web service methods. These complex data types are part of the generated proxy class, which you can use when developing in the Microsoft .NET Framework environment.
When you generate a proxy class, the complex data types that are defined in the WSDL file are represented by the classes of the proxy, which include properties that correspond to the various SOAP elements of the complex data types. Sequences of these data types become arrays of objects that you can enumerate through in your code. This eliminates the need to work directly with the XML structures sent in SOAP messages. The .NET Framework handles that translation for you.