Understanding the Web Services Architecture and File Locations (Real-Time, Windows)

Parent Topic: Developing Web Services

This topic describes the Web services architecture, supported data types in Web services, and the Web services file system.

Note For more information about concepts in this topic, refer to the Web services introduction and tutorial. LabVIEW Web services are available only in the LabVIEW Full Development System and the LabVIEW Professional Development System.

Web Services Architecture

LabVIEW Web services use RESTful Web service architecture, which is based upon the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture. RESTful provides a lightweight protocol accessible to a wide variety of HTTP-enabled clients and does not require complex message parsing.

Supported Data Types in Web Services

Web services support the following data types:

  • string
  • path
  • Boolean
  • numeric (except complex numbers)
  • enumeration (unsigned 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit)
  • array (JSON and XML output only)
  • cluster (JSON and XML output only)
  • digital/analog waveform (JSON and XML output only)
  • timestamp, formatted as string (JSON and XML output only)

Web Services File System and.LVWS Files

Note The following section applies only to Web services you include in LabVIEW stand-alone applications.

LabVIEW uses a .lvws file to publish Web services to the web server that hosts them. When you publish a Web service, LabVIEW packages all necessary files into a zip file with the .lvws extension and deploys the file to the target web server. LabVIEW then unzips the file and installs the Web service components into a unique directory on the target web server.