## Web service data sources

Web services provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. It is a way to connect to a remote application and request data directly from the application without going directly to a DBMS. JReport Designer supports SOAP web services defined by WSDL 1.1 or WSDL 2.0 as data sources. You can add a SOAP web service data source to a catalog by importing a WSDL file.

This section describes the following tasks:

- Setting up a web service connection
- Adding tables to a web service connection
- Editing the operation used to create tables
- Example: Developing reports from web service data source