Chapter 19. Composing Web Service calls

 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]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.