A WSDL file contains a description of the data to be passed to the web service so that the sender and the receiver understand the data to exchange. You must import a WSDL file to the repository before you can create a Web Service Consumer transformation.
The WSDL describes the operations to perform on the data and a binding to a protocol or transport, so that the web service consumer can send the request message in the correct format. The WSDL describes the network address to connect to the web service.
The WSDL includes information about how to encode SOAP request and response messages. SOAP encoding determines the format of the SOAP message body. It describes the format for request and response messages that the web service uses to communicate to the web service consumer. Web service developers can use a variety of toolkits to create web services. Toolkits support different ways of encoding SOAP messages.
The Web Service Consumer transformation supports the document/literal SOAP encoding style. You can use WSDL 1.1 with the Web Service Consumer transformation. You cannot use WSDL attachments such as MIME, DIME, and MTOM messages.