WSDL is an XML-based interface definition language that describes web services and how to access them. If you use a web service to interface with the MDM Hub, use the classes and methods described in the SIF API reference documentation through proxies that wrap the interactions in SOAP messages. You can use a tool based on your development environment to interpret WSDL.

The development environment can be Eclipse, Microsoft Visual Studio, or other web service client tools. For example, .NET has tools to read WSDL and create proxies that you can call from the programming language you use. The Eclipse integrated development environment has a web services browser that reads the WSDL and presents the information in a user-friendly way.

Use the following URL to access the WSDL, where

host

is the name of the computer that runs the application server and

port

is the port on which the host computer accepts the MDM Hub requests:

You can generate WSDL for specific business entities and operations. The following sample request shows how to generate WSDL for the Person and Household business entities and for the write and read operations:

http://<host>:<port>/cmx/csfiles/<orsId>/<orsId>.wsdl?entities=Person,Household&operations=ReadEntity,WriteEntity

The SiperianClient proxy uses the SOAP protocol to communicate with the web service and receive requests from your application program. The SiperianClient proxy translates the requests into SOAP messages and send them to the web service. The web service decodes the SOAP messages and translates them to Java calls for the SiperianClient running on the application server. The web service receives responses from the SiperianClient, encodes them into SOAP messages, and sends them back to the SiperianClient proxy. The SiperianClient proxy returns the responses to your application program.

The MDM Hub uses Axis version 1.3, which is an XML-based web service framework. Use Axis to configure SIF as web services and access the web services through a URL. For example, if you use SoapUI to view a list of web services, the tool presents the list of web services that you configured in Axis. When you deploy the Hub Server on the application server, Axis is automatically deployed.

You can also create and deploy a web service to process ORS-specific requests.