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Web Services and SOAP Endpoints

Process Designer exposes web services through an automatically generated WSDL interface that you can access and use as a SOAP endpoint. Each web service you interact with contains a set of methods, also called operations, hosted on an application server. You can invoke these operations remotely in the cloud or over a network. When you invoke an operation, you create a SOAP message and send it to the web service, typically over HTTP/ HTTPS. SOAP is a commonly used XML-based messaging protocol used to exchange information.

A web service has a WSDL (Web Services Definition Language) document, an XML description of the operations and how to invoke them. Every web service you want to interact with must have a service name and an endpoint URL (the location to which you send SOAP messages in order to invoke the operation).

The caller of the web service need not know anything about the internal details, as the SOAP interface publishes the available operations. For each call, the web service returns a response message. The response contains either the information requested or fault information, in case of an error.

This simple SOAP message calls the "Add" method and returns the answer:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope
    xmlns:SOAP-ENV='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/'
    xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'
    xmlns:s='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema'>
    <SOAP-ENV:Body>
        <Add xmlns="http://www. math.org">
            <arg1 xsi:type="s:decimal">100</arg1>
            <arg2 xsi:type="s:decimal">25</arg2>
        </Add>
    </SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

In this case, the response message is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope
    xmlns:SOAP-ENV='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/'
    xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'
    xmlns:s='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema'>
    <SOAP-ENV:Body>
        <AddResponse xmlns="http://www.math.org">
            <AddResult>125</AddResult>
        </AddResponse>
    </SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

Definition of Processes Exposed as Web Services

When you define processes with Process Designer, the SOAP endpoint is available for use by SOAP clients that handle the "xsd:any" payload style, which means the clients can process inputs, outputs and handle faults.

Process Designer supports the SOAP 1.1 standard with the document/literal message style and encoding option used by most web services.

With the WSDL interface, you can:

Define WSDL input and output types with an inline schema based on the process input and output fields or process objects. The namespace is automatically generated.

Display the SOAP Service URL in the process details.

Link to the WSDL definition from the process details.

Use basic authentication, consistent with REST.

Generate faults using a Throw step, which allows you to share a single fault and provide a description.

Generate correlation properties in the WSDL to handle inline message events and boundary conditions.

To define a SOAP endpoint in Process Designer:

In the process properties, choose

REST/SOAP

as the

Start

Binding

The following image shows the

Binding

property set as REST/SOAP:

After you define and publish the process, you can see the SOAP Service URL.

The following image shows the SOAP Service URL:

Click

View WSDL File

to open the complete WSDL and view the SOAP message generated for the process. You can copy the URL to use it as an endpoint.

If a process contains Japanese characters in its name, you might see an error when you view the WSDL file from a Chrome browser. If you see an error, right-click on the page and select

View page source

to view the WSDL file.

Invoking Processes Deployed to the Cloud Server

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