Chapter 18. Composing Web Service calls

Table of Contents

Overview
Composing a SOAP request
Testing remote WSDL files
The UDDI Registry browser
Generate WSDL documentation

Overview

Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is an XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information.

The WSDL files contain information about the published services, like the name, the message types and the bindings. The editor is offering a way to edit the WSDL files that is similar to editing XML, the content completion and validation being driven by a mix of the WSDL and SOAP schemas. <oXygen/> supports WSDL version 1.1 and 2.0 and SOAP versions 1.1 and 1.2. That means that in the location where a SOAP extension can be inserted the content completion assistant offers elements from both SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2. Validation of SOAP requests is executed first against a SOAP 1.1 schema and after that against a SOAP 1.2 schema. In addition to validation against the XSD schemas the WSDL file is also analysed during validation so that more element reference specific problems can be detected.

Note

For WSDL 2.0 only content completion and validation are supported. That means if the namespace of the WSDL file is http://www.w3.org/ns/wsdl the content completion and validation work with a WSDL 2.0 schema but a SOAP request cannot be obtained and edited correctly yet in the WSDL SOAP Analyser view starting from a WSDL 2.0 file.

After you edit and validate your Web service descriptor against a mix of the XML Schemas for WSDL and SOAP it is very easy to check if the defined SOAP messages are accepted by the remote Web Services server using <oXygen/>'s WSDL SOAP Analyser integrated tool.