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# Research Architecture from a Developer Perspective

The architecture of research services is easy to understand. The developer builds a custom research service or set of services as an XML Web service or pair of Web services. This Web service corresponds to a "provider" and can process various types of searches, each of which corresponds to a "service." For more information, see Research Architecture from an IT Perspective.

All communication between the Research task pane and the Web services that it queries uses Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages. These SOAP messages contain XML packets that conform to schemas specific to each type of request and response. For more information about the schemas that define the terms of research service communication, see XML Schemas Overview.

The Registration and Query methods

The developer of a custom research service must write code to respond to the two scenarios in which Microsoft® Office 2003 clients contact the service: when the user registers the service for the first time (or updates it later), and when the user queries the service. Therefore, the XML Web service normally contains the Registration and Query methods that respond to these two events. In both cases, the Research task pane sends a properly formatted request packet to the Web service, and the Web service responds with a response packet that conforms to the appropriate schemas.

For more information, see Handling Registration Requests and Handling Queries.

Note The Registration Web method is invoked when users add a service manually by entering the URL, and when a service is advertised on discovery servers. For more information, see Deployment Overview. The Registration method is also used to update or remove a service. For more information, see Updating and Removing Services.

Developer options for search results

The Research task pane uses XML for all communications and for the display and manipulation of search results. The layout of results is very flexible, because developers can use XML and smart tags to provide rich formatting, collapsible lists, intelligent content-based actions, and so forth.

Research service providers can specify custom actions for the content they return. These actions are presented to users by using the same mechanism that is used to expose built-in content actions, such as inserting and copying. The actions themselves are carried out through smart tags provided by the service provider. Therefore, the Research task pane does not need to maintain information about smart tags. For example, a research service may return a response containing a smart tag that allows users to obtain additional live data, transform the response text, or some other action. An Insert action can also insert content into Microsoft Office Word 2003 and Microsoft Office Excel 2003 documents as XML, allowing additional actions to become available within the document.

For more information, see Adding Actions to Query Results.

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