Synchronous and Asynchronous Web Services

Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway supports both synchronous and asynchronous service processing and invocation for SOAP-based services.

Interfaces exposed as REST services can be generated with the support for synchronous interaction pattern only. Asynchronous pattern for REST services is currently not supported in this release.

Synchronous Web Services

This type of service invocation provides an immediate response to a query. In this situation, the client will wait until the server sends back the response message. The advantage of using the synchronous service is that the client application knows the status of the web service operation in a very short time.

When a web service client sends a synchronous SOAP request to an Oracle E-Business Suite service, the SOAP response will be sent back to the client as soon as the process completes.
Asynchronous Web Services (SOAP Web Services Only)

This type of service invocation may require a significant amount of time to process a request. However, the client that invokes the Oracle E-Business Suite service can continue with other processing in the meantime rather than wait for the response.

Asynchronous operation is extremely useful for environments in which a service, such as a loan processor, can take a long time to process a client request.

In this release, asynchronous operation pattern is supported for SOAP-based services only.

Callback without Acknowledgement

Callback pattern is a very important communication method in asynchronous services - a request is made to the service provider and a response is sent back to the requester when it is ready. This pattern can be used in conjunction with acknowledgement to recognize the receipt of a request sent by a requester. Only callback without acknowledgement pattern is supported in this release.

In callback without acknowledgment pattern, a SOAP Callback header becomes necessary when the web service is asynchronous and the client contact information is unknown at the deployment time. Callback header allows the client to specify how to contact the client (ReplyTo address) in the request for service. Therefore, the client must publish a listener or a receive service. In other words, the structure of the WSDL dictates how the client will receive the response.

A web service client must provide MessageID, and an appropriate callback endpoint address (ReplyTo and FaultTo) using WS-Addressing in the SOA Headers for the asynchronous request callback pattern.

When a web service client sends a SOAP request to an Oracle E-Business Suite service, on completion of the service invocation, the SOAP response (service response payload) is sent to the ReplyTo address of the client. This pattern does not expect acknowledgment from the client as it is a fire-and-forget message exchange pattern for callback.

SOAP services, depending on specified interaction patterns, can be generated synchronously, asynchronously, or both synchronously and asynchronously to meet your business needs. REST services can be generated with synchronous operation only.

Once a SOAP service has been generated and deployed to an Oracle SOA Suite WebLogic managed server, service consumers or web service clients can send request messages through Oracle SOA Suite. After security checks on the inbound requests, Oracle E-Business Suite web services can be invoked synchronously or asynchronously.

For information on how to specify interaction patterns for a given interface, see Generating SOAP Web Services.