Okay, so web service client tooling may or may not stand up to complex WSDL files. What about standing up to complex XML response documents? Most of the examples posted on the Internet are simple interfaces like Fahrenheit to Celsius conversions. What happens when XML responses are more hierarchical?
http://www.radile.com/rdweb/temp/xml.html
That's a link to a small sampling of XML documents which are part of the School Interoperability Framework (SIF). The SIF specification has been growing like a cancer over a period of years. Now it's up to 178 document formats.
A couple things concern me about complying with the specification.
First, the data models are not normalized. You find the same XML elements defined in many different documents. The irony is that these documents are meant to share data between disparate systems. Why make that more difficult by duplicating data elements in multiple documents? Why not normalize your XML documents like you'd normalize your database?
Second, the documents contain hierarchical structures. How well will client tooling handle them?
Third, what if you find data elements that don't have clear meaning? What is this field? What does it stand for? How do we use it? And it's not like a WSDL file is going to clarify the questions, other than perhaps indicate the data type of the element.
-Nathan
----- Original Message -----
From: Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc:
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2012 9:35 AM
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Web Services War Stories
On Jan 30, 2012, at 11:20 AM, web400-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
You've got to give someone credit for the amount of code that must have gone into PHP SoapClient to simplify the interface as they did. I wonder how well it works with complex WSDL files ... <snip>
I've actually got one it can't handle Nathan. There is an issue when there are duplicate definitions used. I'm not sure of the exact issue but it relates to the fact that in the wsdl I have there are two includes referenced that contain the custom data type definitions. Problem arises because one of them includes and references element definitions in the other. SoapUI handles it and ignores the duplicate entries. The PHP parser craps out and can't handle it. The problem can apparently be cured by judicious editing of the wsdl - but I'm not savvy enough with wsdls to be able to sort it out (I have tried but ...). Originally vendor support staff told me that could could give me instructions on how to make the change. Now they are refusing and claim that none of their staff would ever have told me that <sigh>
Jon Paris
www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com
midrange.com
