Maintaining XAI Inbound Services

XAI Inbound Service is a legacy mechanism for exposing system services to external systems as web services. The current supported mechanism for defining web services is Inbound Web Services, which should be used for any new web service.

Some framework based products and existing implementations may have existing XAI inbound services that may need to be viewed. For these services, the product supports deploying them as SOAP inbound web services for execution. Refer to Deploying XAI Inbound Service via IWS.

The following sections describe basic information about the maintenance pages. Note that some of the information is related to legacy functionality that is no longer supported.

XAI Inbound Service - Main

To view an inbound service, open Admin > XAI > XAI Inbound Service.

Description of Page

XAI In Service Name is used in the system to identify the service. The service name is also the first XML element after the <Body> element in the XML request/response document. The XAI Service ID serves as the primary key.

Owner indicates if this XAI inbound service is owned by the base package or by your implementation ( Customer Modification). This information is display-only.

The Adapter defines the interface with the target application server.

If adapter for this service invokes a system service, then the appropriate Service Name is visible.

If adapter is the Business Adapter then Schema Type and Schema Name reference the object to invoke.

Web Service Category is visible if the XAI inbound service is linked to one or more web service categories.

Use the Description and Long Description to describe the service.

Check the Active switch if this service is enabled and available for execution.

Post Error is not applicable.

Trace is not applicable.

Debug is not applicable.

Schema Definitions

Note: Request Schema and Response Schema are not applicable to services invoking schema-based objects. They do not appear when the Business Adapter is used.

The next two properties define the request and response XML schemas. The schemas are SOAP compatible. The schema XML files are expected to be stored in the Schemas Directory on the Web server running the XAI server.

The Request Schema is the XML schema defining the service request. The request sent to the server must adhere to the schema definition.

The Response Schema is the XML schema defining the service response. The response generated by the XAI server corresponds to the response schema definition.

The same service may perform several actions on a business object. Use the Transaction Type to define the default action performed by a service. The transaction type can be provided when invoking a service, by dynamically specifying a transaction type attribute on the Service element of the XML request. This field may take the following values: Read, Add, Change, Update, Delete, List and Search.

Note: The difference between Change and Update is that for Change, all field values must be passed in with the request. Field values that are not passed in to the request are set to null. For Update, you need only pass the primary key field values and the values of the fields to be updated. All other fields retain their existing values.

Services, which perform a Search, may allow searching based on different criteria. When the Transaction Type value is Search, use the Search Type to define the default search criteria. The possible values are Main, Alternate1, Alternate2, Alternate3, Alternate4, Alternate5 and Alternate6.

Note: This is a default definition only and it may be overridden at run time when the service is invoked. To override the search type at run time, you should specify the searchType attribute on the Service element of the XML request.

XSL Transformation Definitions

Sometimes, the XML request document does not conform to the request schema, or the response document expected by the service requestor is not the one generated by the adapter. In such cases the request and/or the response documents must be transformed. The XAI server supports transformation through XSL transformation scripts. Transformation scripts may be applied to the request before it is passed to the adapter or applied to the response document before it is sent to the service requestor.

The Request XSL is the name of the XSL transformation to be applied to the request document before processing it. The transformation is usually required when the incoming document does not correspond to the XAI service request schema therefore it has to be transformed before it can be processed by the adapter.

The Response XSL is the name of the XSL transformation to be applied to the response document when the requester of the service expects the response to have a different XML document structure than the one defined by the response schema for the service.

Click the WSDL URL hyperlink to launch a separate window that contains the WSDL definition for the inbound service. Note that the server name and port number for the URL are built using a setting in the common properties file using the XAI HTTP Caller URL setting.