XDS.b Implementation

This page is a placeholder for future XDS.b Implementation Notes
Rruggeri 15:49, 26 July 2007 (CDT)

Generating Proxies using SOAP Tools

There are some general guidelines to follow when generating proxies, especially for complex WSDL/schemas such as the ones included in XDS.b, that will make your life much, much easier.

The first one is use generic, non-strongly typed WSDL for development purposes, that is for the purpose of generating the proxy.
Strongly typed WSDL will force the infrastructure to go through all the xml type definitions and generate classes for them. The mapping between XSD and object oriented constructs is not always straightforward and you might run into some problems even with valid instances.
This approach works well for your average weather web service, but not for more complex scenarios like the ones we have to deal with.

Furthermore, generating classes through proxies will force turning the XML in the SOAP message to objects where most likely you will have to deal with the XML anyways. This step can also be somewhat resource intensive as it forces a validation of the whole message which is usually avoided in production environments with high transaction volume.

Generic WSDL for development replace the types of the input/output SOAP messages with generic xs:any types. By generating the proxy from that modified WSDL you get a method signature that basically only deals with raw XML documents for input and output. Yes, you lose "automatic" XSD validation, but you can always put that step back in if you want and make it optional when you go to production.