calling a web service from Excel

Recently I evaluated the possibility to call a web service from Excel. The call is encapsulated within a function which can be used as a formula from within Excel.

Chebi web services returns multiple hits

Today I tried the getStructureSearch() method from EMBL-EBI to resolve some of the structures with in the GMD into Chebi identifiers. Strangly some of the compounds resultet in multiple hits even with search set to IDENTITY.

...
ChebiWebServicePortTypeClient ChebiClient = new ChebiWebServicePortTypeClient();
ChebiClient.getStructureSearchCompleted += new EventHandler(ChebiClient_getStructureSearchCompleted);

getStructureSearch structure = new getStructureSearch();
structure.structure = mymolfile; //here goes the molFile structure
structure.type = StructureType.MOLFILE;
structure.structureSearchCategory = StructureSearchCategory.IDENTITY;
structure.totalResults = 1;
structure.tanimotoCutoff = 0.5f;

ChebiClient.getStructureSearchAsync(structure, null);
...



For a structure of Glucose 4 results are returned:

• http://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/searchId.do?chebiId=CHEBI:17234
• http://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/searchId.do?chebiId=CHEBI:42758
• http://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/searchId.do?chebiId=CHEBI:17634
• http://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/searchId.do?chebiId=CHEBI:584174

Strange enough I setted totalResults = 1 and still get more than one result...

Any ideas out there?



Update:

Janna Hastings from ChEBI acknowledge that I have picked up on a bug in the ChEBI
webservice implementation of the structure search. This was resolved in the release July 7th.