Deploying Web Services

This topic describes the configuration needed for using inbound web services.

Once an Inbound Web Service is defined it is not automatically available to the Web Service Clients to access the system. The Deployment Status and the Active flag (set to true) indicate whether a Web Service is available or not. The last step is to deploy the Inbound Web Services to the J2EE Web Application Server. This deployment phase has a number of steps that are automatically performed when a deployment is initiated:

There are two methods available for deploying inbound web services:

Inbound Web Service Deployment Portal

To use the online Inbound Web Service Deployment portal, navigate using Admin > External Message > Inbound Web Service Deployment.

The following sections describe the base zones that are provided on the portal.

Deploy Inbound Web Services

The Deploy Inbound Web Services zone provides information about the last deployment. Use the Deploy button to deploy or re-deploy inbound web services. All inbound web services whose Active switch is Yes will be deployed. All whose active switch is No will be undeployed.

Note: When an Inbound Web Service is deployed, the value of its service revision field is captured. Certain changes to configuration will require re-deployment to take effect. When any of the following changes occur, the IWS service revision value is incremented. This will cause the deployment status to show Needs Deploy.
  • Active switch is changed

  • An Annotation is added or removed

  • An Operation is added or removed.

  • The Operation Name, Schema Type / Schema Name, Request or Response Schema, Request or Response XSL for an Operation is changed.

Note: In addition, if the implementation supports XAI services deployed through IWS, the appropriate XAI inbound services will also be deployed or undeployed as required.

Deployment Status

The Deployment Status zone displays a list of inbound web services in the product, including the deployment status.

The deployment status is determined by comparing the internal Service Revision field on each IWS against the value captured at the time of deployment.

Use the broadcast button adjacent to any of the inbound web services listed in the zone to view the details of the IWS record. This causes the Inbound Web Service zone to appear. It is the same zone that appears on the Inbound Web Service maintenance portal.

XAI Inbound Service Deployment Status

The XAI Inbound Service Deployment Status zone is only visible if the feature configuration option Support XAI Services via IWS is configured on the External Messages feature type or if the system detects that there are XAI inbound services that have been deployed. (The latter condition is checked for the case where an implementation has XAI inbound services deployed and then choses to discontinue using this functionality. After changing the feature configuration option to false, one more deployment is required to “undeploy” the XAI services.) The zone displays a list of XAI inbound services in the product that are related to page services. Refer to Deploying XAI Inbound Service via IWS for more information.

The deployment status is determined by comparing the record’s Version field against the value captured at the time of deployment.

XAI inbound service does not have the equivalent of a Service Revision field that inbound web service has, which is only incremented when changes are made to the record that impact deployment. For XAI inbound service, the version number on the record is used. This field is incremented when any changes are made, even ones that may not impact deployment. As a result, some XAI Inbound Services may indicate “Needs Deploy” in cases where a redeployment may not be necessary. The recommendation when this occurs is to simply Deploy again to be safe.