So of late, I’ve been building lots of mobile applications that work by calling web-services.   I’ve found myself time and time again passing the same parameters to each web-service function.

This was getting a bit boring,  so I decided it was time to try and take the pain out of this repetitive process.   

I’ve decided to now pass a standard class filled with useful parameters each time I make a web-service call.

So take the call to Login  I now do the following -

lr = ra.Login(OURUSERID, Elements.BuildIn());

Now this doesn’t look that unusual, passing in the userid, we want to authenticate.

Elements.BuildIn(),  is where all the action is at.   This ensures we pass in a whole bunch of useful information and is as follows -

public static WSIn BuildIn()
      {
          WSIn ret = new WSIn();
          ret.BluetoothOn = Elements.BlueToothEnabled;
          ret.Company = Settings.Company;
          ret.Printer = Settings.Printer;
          ret.Profile = Core.AppSetting("profilename");
          ret.SoftwareVersion = System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName().Version.ToString();
          ret.User = Globals.Instance.UserID;
          ret.AppName = Core.AppSetting("AppName");
          ret.Location = Settings.Location;
          return ret;
      }

I do this for each call,   so we always get passed to the web-service  that location of the user,  their company ,  the software version, whether they are using a Bluetooth printer etc.

This saves a tonne of time.