In this final section of the article we will show you the simple AJAX Service that we have created that the client code will use to access the database and retrieve information about the number of records stored in the database.

Listing 6

[ScriptService]
public class InboxService: System.Web.Services.WebService
{
  [WebMethod]
  public int GetLatestNumberOfEmails()
  {
    int numberOfEmails = 0;
 
    using(SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection
      (WebConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[0].ConnectionString))
    {
      using(SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("GetLatestNumberOfEmails", conn))
      {
        cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;
 
        conn.Open();
        numberOfEmails = (int)cmd.ExecuteScalar();
      }
    }
 
    return numberOfEmails;
  }
}

The first thing to notice is the ScriptService attribute located at top of the service name. This is very important if you want your Web service to be a script callable service. The above web service includes one Web method which is GetLatestNumberOfEmails that accesses the database and retrieves the total number of emails or records in the database.