1. Integration Playbooks for Procurement
  2. SOAP Services

SOAP Services

Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement provides customers and system integrators with a comprehensive set of SOAP APIs to execute CRUD operations on a business object or participate in a business process in real-time.

Key Features

  • SOAP services are used only for both inbound and outbound flow.
  • Support for real-time integration requirements.
  • Support for CRUD operations on both single-item and collection.
  • Many product teams support BATCH operations on their objects, which allows them to execute multiple updates, insert, delete, and get operations in a single call.
  • Along with CRUD operations, many Oracle Procurement applications support custom actions.
  • Extensive support across Oracle Procurement applications.
  • End-to-end process orchestration can easily use SOAP services.
  • Support only for XML format.

Best Practices

  • Review the SOAP Web Services for Procurement guide thoroughly to understand the available functionalities, operations, and data structures.
  • When using SOAP services to retrieve data, always try to use the find operation rather than the simple get operation. You can use the find operation to specify a list of attributes to include or exclude in response.
  • If parsing SOAP responses programmatically (like in Java), always use an XML parser instead of text parsers. Text parsing is error-prone, especially if the XML structure changes or if namespaces are involved.
  • If you contact Oracle Support, ensure you log errors and important transaction details. To quickly resolve errors, Oracle Support would need the exact time for the SOAP call and input and output payloads.

Constraints

  • Not suitable for large volumes of data import/export.
  • SOAP services don't support pagination by default and might suffer from timeout for large volumes of data.
  • When it comes to performance and scalability, REST APIs outperform SOAP APIs. Therefore, Oracle recommends that customers use REST APIs instead of SOAP services whenever equivalent REST APIs are available.
  • Many SOAP APIs have been deprecated in favor of REST equivalents. Deprecated APIs might not be fully supported or enhanced. Check the documentation and don't use deprecated SOAP APIs.