The pipeline which CICS® uses to process Web service requests
and responses is generic, in that there are few restrictions on what processing
can be performed in each message handler. However, many Web service applications
use SOAP messages, and any processing of those messages should comply with
the SOAP specification. Therefore, CICS provides special SOAP message
handler programs that can help you to configure your pipeline as a
SOAP node.
- Your pipeline can be configured to support SOAP 1.1 or SOAP
1.2. Within your CICS system, you can have many pipelines, some of which
support SOAP 1.1 and some of which support SOAP 1.2.
- A pipeline can be configured for use in a service requester,
or in a service provider:
- A service requester pipeline is the initial SOAP sender for the request,
and the ultimate SOAP receiver for the response
- A service provider pipeline is the ultimate SOAP receiver for the request,
and the initial SOAP sender for the response
You
cannot configure a CICS pipeline to function as a SOAP intermediary.
- You can configure a CICS pipeline to have more than one SOAP message handler.
- The CICS-provided SOAP message handlers can be configured to invoke one
or more user-written header-handling routines.
The CICS-provided SOAP message handlers can
be configured to enforce some aspects of compliance with the WS-I Basic Profile
1.1 and Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0, and to enforce the presence of particular
headers in the SOAP message.
The SOAP message handlers, and their header handling routines are specified
in the pipeline configuration file.