SOAP Handler question

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Hi All,

I am very new to webMethods and ESB, so I imagine (or rather I hope) there is an easy answer to this question which I have simply missed through inexperience…

Here’s a little background: I work for a company, who in turn uses a third party external provider as a “portal”; they hold the WSD/WSDL for a web service which they have published for us, in order to provide connectivity between external software packages and our systems. The end users of this provider send their web service call to the provider, who manage and host the WSD externally to our systems, and forward the SOAP message over http direct to our application servers. We are currently handling the SOAP messages using a customised SOAP Handler, but now want to do this using web methods, on the Integration Server…

At the moment, I cant see a way of calling a service in webMethods (one capable of handling a SOAP message) externally other than if I have exposed the service as a web service within webMethods… the problem is that the messages we currently get forwarded from the external provider wont be in the correct format to interract with the WSD that gets created by default within webMethods. So, I am hoping there is a simple way of defining a service in webMethods 7.1 (later moving to version 8.0) which can just behave as a SOAP Handler to the outside world, rather than the handler having to be defined as part of a WSD?

I hope my description of the above scenario makes sense; sorry if my terminology is a little light, I havent really worked much with web services at the lower level; the WSD/WSDL side of things has always been handled by the third party.

Any help much appreciated, many thanks in advance…

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Leo,
Create a webservice wrapper within webMethods that works as the interface b/w your ‘client applications’ and the ‘web service external provider’. inside this wrapper you can implement the handling part to deal with format mismatches and transformations. This web service you can expose to your client apps - who then do not need to worry about how to call external provider service and the surrounding complications.

Cheers!

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Thanks for the reply,

Unfortunately, I think I’ve confused things by the way I’ve described the problem; we do not have access to the client apps, they are completely external to our domain; basically we are forced to find a way of handling the messages the way they come in currently, its a b2b relationship.

What I am looking for is for WM to behave as a sort of “front-end” SOAP Handler, providing b2b support to the external software packages who use the third party.

We could build an external interface which just handles the http requests and then calls a WM web service containing our required mapping logic, returning the subsequent response to the third party in the appropriate format etc. I am just trying to establish whether we have to do this part of the processing externally to WM, or whether the whole process can be contained within WM? Is there b2b support with WM 7.1/8.0 or would we need a different WM package entirely?

Hope I am making sense!

Thanks again…