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Research Service Sample Walkthrough

The IBuySpy Sample included with this SDK is a good example of a research service written with Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET that observes the coding practices suggested in Building a Research Web Service. This sample not only displays formatted content in the Research task pane from the Response.Content and the Response.Form namespaces, but it also enhances the query results with custom actions implemented in a smart tag DLL. In this topic, we take a look at the IBuySpy sample and some of the techniques it uses to achieve powerful results in the Research task pane.

Important  Since the IBuySpy sample includes complete source code, this topic includes only limited excerpts from the code. The excerpts that are shown may omit variable declarations, error handling, and other important sections of the code. We suggest that you set up the IBuySpy sample and open it in Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET so that you can follow along during this walkthrough. Note that the Utils class referenced in the code samples in this topic is a helper class of support functions in the IBuySpy sample.

ShowRegistration method

Show Query method: Introduction

In the following sections, we take a look at six different query scenarios in the IBuySpy sample. For each query scenario, we examine:

  1. The steps to follow in Microsoft Office Word 2003 to launch the query.
  2. The visual results of the query in the Research task pane.
  3. The important portions of the XML query request packet sent from the Research task pane to the research service.
  4. The important portions of the research service code that processes the query.
  5. The important portions of the XML query response packet returned by the research service to the Research task pane.

ShowQuery method: Keyword search (no results found)

ShowQuery method: Products by Category

ShowQuery method: Keyword search (results found)

ShowQuery method: Product Details

ShowQuery method: Advanced Product Search form

ShowQuery method: Advanced Product Search results

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