A recent requirement at one of our clients saw the need to dig deep into the realms of integration and Web Services. It’s one of those concepts that is big in the business and shrouded in mystery and complexity. With a bit of reading and a bit of practical application, it really isn’t that difficult and you will find it a useful and rewarding technology to master. I thought I’d start with a quick run down of concepts then move on to an example or two over the coming weeks.
First up, head on down to w3schools.com and run through their Web Services Tutorial. Here, you’ll begin to see that the concepts around Web Services – XML, SOAP and WSDL – really aren’t that complex at all and are quite logical. With a bit of XML and HTML know-how, it should all start to make a great deal of sense. To me, this was the major step in demystifying the technology and made me realise that it was within my ability to master.
When we start applying these principals to Siebel, there are a number key components that tie in with the basic WS concepts:
- Integration Objects – meta data representing the structure of the entities that we will be passing around. XML in the SOAP payload will follow the structures we define in the IOs
- Data Maps – A wonderful Siebel 7 component that allows mapping from the external IO to the internal IO. Simple expressions are supported to allow some quite complex transformations that would have taken a Business Service and eScript to achieve in earlier versions
- Web Services – Provide the description of the Web Service that we’re consuming or exposing – these tie in nicely with the WSDL component mentioned above and are key to defining and describing the function we’re exposing or executing. Inbound Web Services expose functionality within Siebel to an external party. Outbound Web Services consume some functionality exposed through an external application
- Workflow Processes – These provide the glue to chain together the components of both Inbound and Outbound Web Services and should already be familiar to most Siebel developers
Siebel provides a host of tools to help develop these components automatically to create both inbound and outbound Web Services. You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve using out of the box functionality and some basic Tools configuration.
A final tip to end this post: download a copy of SOAP UI. This is a simple, free utility that you will find invaluable when testing your Web Services. Download it now and we’ll see how to use it in the posts to come.
In the next post, we’ll create an Inbound Web Service that will allow an external application to grab data out of Siebel over the web. You’ll see how the ‘Deploy as Web Service’ option in Tools makes this really, really easy!
