Garbage in, Garbage out (what else would you expect?)
Maurice
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Nathan Andelin
Sent: 30 January 2012 19:13
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Web Services War Stories
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
