Are there any conflicts with a web service calling another web service?

Question

While the intention of my solution isn't necessary, I have run into a situation where I need to write a web service as an intermediate step in between the client and another web service.

[client] => [my web service] => [3rd party web service]

I am looking to see if anyone has any experience with this situation who could offer any advise or advise on any caveats that I can expect.

Note: I am developing using .NET and VS2008

Answer 1

No, its fine. In fact, its a great method to avoid a client from calling two web services when those calls are expensive (say from a phone). I created a solution once upon a time where my phone app would call my own web service, which would call another one, strip away a lot of the data and return the rest. You can get some pretty impressive perf increases if the main web service returns a lot of data.

The only catch may be authentication and that depends on a lot of variables and such. Good luck!

Answer 2

I've done it. It works fine. The only real concern is the same concern you'd have anyway - if the connection is broken between the two web serices, it's just another possible point of failure.