Before You Begin: It’s recommended that you have a client administrator user role or work with a user with that role type. The following process steps assume that you have a client administrator user role.
After you have these resources locally available, you can begin planning and developing.
Determine Your Requirements
Review the Dayforce Web Services Introduction Guide to gain an understanding of the available web services features and their acceptable usage guidelines. Consult with your developers to help determine the web services methods that you want to use.
Configure a Test Instance
Using the configure a test instance of Dayforce to work with the web services methods you decided on in the first step.
Assess Your Security Requirements
Use the Web Services Explorer to ensure compliance with data security guidelines and to understand the web services methods your organization will use.
Important: Do not access Dayforce web services from an external application until this step is complete, because it guarantees configuration problems will not interfere with the expected results.
Go to System Admin > Web Services > Explorer to use the Web Services Explorer feature to perform the following steps:
- Confirm that data is secure before you provide developers with the credentials created for web services.
- Get a more thorough understanding of the web services methods your organization might use. The Web Services Explorer feature provides actual data from the Dayforce instance. It also provides code snippets in both .NET and Java, so your developers can see exactly how requests are made based on the inputs provided. An administrator might need to provide some assistance with understanding the data or building reports in Dayforce and making them available to web services.
Develop Your External Projects to Access Dayforce Web Services
After you confirm the security configuration and you understand which web services methods to use, your organization can begin developing external projects to access Dayforce web services. Your developers should use the provided sample application that corresponds with the development platform (.NET or Java) that they will use to build their web services-consuming application.
The ReadMe.txt file in the sample application describes the minimal changes necessary to make the application work with your instance of Dayforce. Developers should run the configured sample application in debug mode to trace its actions and view results at each critical step. This process ensures that the developers have a thorough understanding of the Dayforce web services model by providing a hands-on approach for walking through working code.
Design and Develop a Test Application to Consume Dayforce Web Services on a Non-Production Instance
First, design the application that will consume Dayforce web services. Ensure that your design accounts for data storage, data formatting, error trapping, and processing logs as required by your organization’s planned use.
Next, develop the web services consuming application using a non-production instance of Dayforce.
Finally, go to System Admin > Web Services > Explorer and use the Web Services Explorer to test the web services application using a non-production instance of Dayforce, verifying data using the Web Services Explorer and other Dayforce UIs as needed.
Configure and Deploy the Application to Your Production Environment
Repeat the final web services configurations in the production instance of Dayforce.
Go to System Admin > Web Services > Explorer and use the Web Services Explorer to test your production configurations.
Finally, redirect or redeploy the web services application for production use.