Soap-based web services in a multi-tenant database system

Abstract

Systems and methods for generating dynamic communication contracts in a multi-tenant database system based on the datamodel of the user using the service. The communication contract contains objects, e.g., SOAP-objects, custom to the specific user's datamodel, including standard objects customized to the user's own security model and business purpose as well as entirely unique custom objects that are created by the user and available to only the user's organization. A database server queries the database for all objects available to that user (standard and custom), and all the fields on all those objects that are available to that user. The server iterates over the set of objects and each of their sets of fields and generates a contract that is specifically tailored to the user's own datamodel and field level security. The unique contract can be used to communicate with the server to access information in the user's own schema. For server-side implementation, all SOAP-objects—standard or custom—are translated across all users into a singular programmatic object on the server, which acts as a datamodel dictionary and which is used for looking up datamodel information for any given user and for any given object available to that user. With this datamodel information, the Web service performs access checking of the SOAP object against the given customer making a request, ensuring both the object and the fields on that object are defined and accessible to the user.