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Support for Siebel Web Services

The following elements contribute to the deployment of Siebel Web services.

• Inbound and Outbound Web Services
• Integration Objects
• Business Services

Inbound and Outbound Web Services

Siebel Business Applications support both inbound and outbound Web services:

• Inbound Web services allow external clients to access Siebel functionality. For example, a custom UI that wants to view and modify Siebel service requests.
• Outbound Web services allow Siebel Business Applications to make requests of external applications. For example, if the Siebel Server wanted to provide its clients the option of either searching internally or searching the Internet, then the Siebel Server would invoke an Outbound Web service operation against a third-party search engine, incorporating the results in its own reply to the client.

  Figure 1 displays Inbound and Outbound Web services.

  Figure 1. Inbound and Outbound Web Services

Integration Objects

Integration objects provide the primary means of structuring Web service messages. An integration object can be used to support both inbound and outbound Web services, its use with inbound Web services is more tightly bound to the Siebel Object Manager. An integration object represents a subset of a Siebel Business object. The ways in which the elements of the integration object correspond to the elements of the business component are explained as follows:

• Integration components represent business components.
• Integration component fields represent business component fields.
• Typically defines the structure of data being exchanged between a Siebel application and an external application.
• Internal Component Field names and WSDL element, and attribute names can be different. In Siebel Tools, In the Integration Component Fields applet, the column XML Tag governs the way the field name will appear in the WSDL.

  Figure 2 displays the correspondence between Siebel objects and Integration objects.

  Figure 2. Integration Objects

Business Services

Business services allow you to deploy a reusable object that contains a predefined set of methods. Additionally, deploying business services allows you to model your Web services within Siebel Tools.

Siebel Web services employ two types of business service:

• CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) data services, of the type: UDS and ASI.
• Functional Services such as custom business services and workflow.

  Figure 3 displays business services and their corresponding Web service entities.

  Figure 3. Business Services