Working with an SOA MDS: using abstract WSDL's

The WSDL plays an essential role in defining a web service. Besides describing the structure of the SOAP message, it often contains additional implementation details about the location of the service by having the endpoint described in the service tag. This is what we call a concrete WSDL and it may look as follows:

When we populate our MDS we want it to contain abstract WSDL’s that do not contain these implementation details. This way we take away the direct dependencies between services. It means that the actual referenced services don’t need to be deployed and active in order for our SOA composite to be compiled. It also means we keep our MDS clean in the sense that it does not have any references to other environments.

The way of working with abstract WSDL’s in jDeveloper differs slightly compared to concrete WSDL’s. When creating a reference to a service, you would typically select the WSDL needed from the MDS, as below:

In contrary to using a concrete WSDL you will now get the following warning to notify you the WSDL doesn’t contain any bindings. This is perfectly fine and we can just continue by clicking ‘Yes’.

If you now check the composite.xml, you will notice that no binding details were provided in the binding.ws tag.

We need to provide them manually by looking up the concrete WSDL within the development environment. The format is as follows for the port details:
<Namespace service>#wsdl.endpoint(Service name/Port name)

In our case it becomes: http://www.stellent.com/FolderInfo/#wsdl.endpoint(FolderInfo/FolderInfoSoap)

In the location attribute we provide the endpoint. Altogether your service reference should look like this:

When we create a deployment for installation on a different environment we will create a deployment plan which contains the endpoints of the target environment. This will overwrite the endpoint we provided in the location attribute of the composite.xml.