Developing and deploying Web services

You can use the workbench to create Web services that expose database operations (SQL SELECT and DML statements, XQuery expressions, or calls to stored procedures) to client applications.

About this task

Web services accept XML messages or URL-encoded parameter strings as requests for database operations. (In the rest of this documentation, XML messages and URL-encoded parameter strings are both referred to as "messages," except where a distinction between the two is necessary.) Web services return results and result sets in XML messages. For operations that perform SQL inserts, updates, and deletes, Web services return a count of the number of new, changed, or deleted rows.

A Web service performs the following actions when it receives a message that contains a request:
  1. Looks in the message to determine the requested database operation.
  2. Extracts the input parameters from the message.
  3. Prepares and executes the statement.
  4. Retrieves the result of the operation.
  5. Generates the output XML message that contains the result.
  6. Sends the output message to the requesting client application.
You have the option of configuring XSL transformations on input and output messages.
XML messages that request an operation and XML messages that return the results of an operation are tagged according to a default XML schema that the workbench generates for each operation. This default schema performs the following functions:
  • Maps input and output parameters to XML tags
  • Maps columns to XML tags
  • Maps SQL data types to XML data types
  • Maps Web service operations to XML tags
  • Provides the general structure of input and output messages

After you develop a Web service, with one click you can deploy it to a Web server. The workbench deploys Web services as Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) Web Archive (WAR) files. You can also use the workbench to generate deployable files only or artifacts for DataPower® and then deploy them yourself.


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