Using IS as a SOAP Handler

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Hi All,

I am very new to webMethods and IS, so I apologise if this is a very dumb question. I imagine (or rather I hope) there is an easy answer 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 company, who hold the WSD/WSDL for a web service which they have published for us, in order to provide connectivity between external software packages (the consumer) and our back office services (we’re ultimately the web service provider even though we dont manage the WSDL).

The end users of the software packages send their web service call to the third party company, 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 we want to do this using web methods, on the Integration Server…

In effect, what we need is for webMethods to just be a SOAP Handler, rather than actually managing the WSD, since this is already being done by the third party company. 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 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; as mentioned 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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I guess the key here is how you want to interact between this 3rd party system and your WM system.
SOAP forwarding is not a good(or even valid) idea, i’d expect issue on interface, namespace etc.
If you still want to use SOAP, expose the WM service as WS, just generate the WSDL file, and give it to this 3rd party, they should consume it and map their inbound service to this WS.
HTH,
Tong

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Thanks for the reply,

Unfortunately, we cant get the third party to do anything and are forced to find a way of handling the messages in the way they come in currently. What I am looking for is for WM to behave as a sort of “front-end” SOAP Handler, effectively providing “b2b” support.

We could build an external interface which just handles the http requests and then calls a WM web service containing our 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 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?

Thanks

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Leo,

A webservice can be hosted on webMethods and your partner can directly call
webMethods webservice.webMethods does have SOAP processing functionality…

HTH!

Cheers!

Shahid