Welcome to MetriWorks - Example Use of Signature on e-commerce catalog Web Service

MetriWorks Signature Example Usage Scenario

Measuring Search Trends for an E-Commerce Catalog

The following example shows a fictitious remodeling supply company called Refurbco that has implemented its product catalog search as a web service. A company would do this in a situation where it wanted to provide its product search feature to third party web sites or web service enabled client applications. Refurbco has implemented its web site search engine using a web service called GetProduct, which has a GetProducts method. Third party sites and other rich clients that Refurbco provides its premiere customers utilize this same service for their product search features as well.

The Web Service:

Here we see the Refurbco home page, search page, and web service test stub showing how the parameters of this service are used. The GetProducts method accepts product searches by keywords, room type, design style, product category, and brand. Additionally, the method accepts a UserId parameter, which is used for authorization and user tracking against the Refurbco product database.

Signature Manager:

The Signature Manager application is used to browse the web services available on the host machine. Here we see the server hosts various web sites and services including the GetProduct web service. On the manager left panel we see the user has drilled down to the method level of the GetProduct web service and selected the GetProducts method. On the right panel, we see the method parameters for both the method request and response. In this case the user has chosen to create a "SOAP Pointer", or searchable index, for each request parameter. Additionally, the user has decided not to index any response parameter data as this would simply report on data that already exists in Refurbco's product database.

Signature Viewer:

Once the Signature Manager has been used to configure SOAP Pointers for the web service, the Signature Viewer may be opened to see the data flowing through the web service. The Signature Viewer allows for the creation of views over each SOAP Pointer for different time periods. In the figure, the user has selected a view of Web Service Usage by User Id, which has data for April 2004. The graph displays total usage of the service for the month. Also available are graphs of usage by distinct User Id accessing the service for the month as well as the top 10 and bottom 10 User Ids for the month. Finally, from the Signature Viewer, the user may also download the raw SOAP data as XML as well as drill to the details of each distinct call.