35.2. CustomerService WSDL Contract

Sample WSDL contract

The WSDL contract used in this demonstration is the CustomerService WSDL contract, which is available in the following location: 
cxf-webinars-jboss-fuse-6.2/src/main/resources/wsdl
Because the WSDL contract is a fairly verbose format, it is not shown in here in full. The main point you need to be aware of is that the CustomerSerivice WSDL contract exposes the following operations:
lookupCustomer
Given a customer ID, the operation returns the corresponding Customer data object.
updateCustomer
Stores the given Customer data object against the given customer ID.
getCustomerStatus
Returns the status of the customer with the given customer ID.

Parts of the WSDL contract

A WSDL contract has the following main parts:

Port type

The port type is defined in the WSDL contract by the wsdl:portType element. It is analogous to an interface and it defines the operations that can be invoked on the Web service.
For example, the following WSDL fragment shows the wsdl:portType definition from the CustomerService WSDL contract: 
<wsdl:definitions name="CustomerService"
	targetNamespace="http://demo.fusesource.com/wsdl/CustomerService/"
    ...>

    ...
    <wsdl:portType name="CustomerService">
        <wsdl:operation name="lookupCustomer">
            <wsdl:input message="tns:lookupCustomer"></wsdl:input>
            <wsdl:output message="tns:lookupCustomerResponse"></wsdl:output>
        </wsdl:operation>
        <wsdl:operation name="updateCustomer">
            <wsdl:input message="tns:updateCustomer"></wsdl:input>
            <wsdl:output message="tns:updateCustomerResponse"></wsdl:output>
        </wsdl:operation>
        <wsdl:operation name="getCustomerStatus">
            <wsdl:input message="tns:getCustomerStatus"></wsdl:input>
            <wsdl:output message="tns:getCustomerStatusResponse"></wsdl:output>
        </wsdl:operation>   
    </wsdl:portType>
    ...
</wsdl:definitions>

WSDL binding

A WSDL binding describes how to encode all of the operations and data types associated with a particular port type. A binding is specific to a particular protocol—for example, SOAP or JMS.

WSDL port

A WSDL port specifies the transport protocol and contains addressing data that enables clients to locate and connect to a remote server endpoint.
For example, the CustomerService WSDL contract defines the following WSDL port: 
<wsdl:definitions ...>
    ...
    <wsdl:service name="CustomerService">
        <wsdl:port name="SOAPOverHTTP" binding="tns:CustomerServiceSOAP">
            <soap:address location="http://0.0.0.0:8183/CustomerService" />
        </wsdl:port>
    </wsdl:service>

</wsdl:definitions>
The address specified by the soap:address element's location attribute in the original WSDL contract is typically overridden at run time, however.

The getCustomerStatus operation

Because a WSDL contract is fairly verbose, it can be a bit difficult to see what the parameters of an operation are. Typically, for each operation, you can find data types in the XML schema section that represent the operation request and the operation response. For example, the getCustomerStatus operation has its request parameters (IN parameters) encoded by the getCustomerStatus element and its response parameters (OUT parameters) encoded by the getCustomerStatusResponse element, as follows: 
<wsdl:definitions name="CustomerService"
	targetNamespace="http://demo.fusesource.com/wsdl/CustomerService/"
    ...>
    <wsdl:types>
        <xsd:schema ...>
            ...
            <xsd:element name="getCustomerStatus">
                <xsd:complexType>
                    <xsd:sequence>
                        <xsd:element name="customerId" type="xsd:string"/>
                    </xsd:sequence>
                </xsd:complexType>
            </xsd:element>
            <xsd:element name="getCustomerStatusResponse">
                <xsd:complexType>
                    <xsd:sequence>
                        <xsd:element name="status" type="xsd:string"/>
                        <xsd:element name="statusMessage" type="xsd:string"/>
                    </xsd:sequence>
                </xsd:complexType>
            </xsd:element>            
        </xsd:schema>		
    </wsdl:types>
    ...
</wsdl:definitions>

References

For more details about the format of WSDL contracts and how to create your own WSDL contracts, see Writing WSDL Contracts and the Eclipse JAX-WS Tools Component.