Web service request types

You can specify the type of client requests to send to the web server when creating a web client function or procedure. The TYPE clause of the CREATE PROCEDURE and CREATE FUNCTION statements formats requests before sending them to a URL. For more information, see Web client SQL statements.

Specifying an HTTP request format

Web client functions and procedures send HTTP requests when the specified format in the TYPE clause begins with an HTTP suffix.

For example, run the following SQL script in the web client database to create an HTTP procedure named MyOperation that sends HTTP requests to the specified URL:

CREATE PROCEDURE MyOperation ( a INTEGER, b CHAR(128) )
    URL 'HTTP://localhost:8020/dbname/SampleWebService'
    TYPE 'HTTP:POST';

In this example, requests are formatted as a HTTP:POST request.

Specifying a SOAP request format

Web client functions and procedures send HTTP requests when the specified format in the TYPE clause begins with a SOAP suffix.

For example, run the following statement in the web client database to create a SOAP procedure named MyOperation that sends SOAP requests to the specified URL:

CREATE PROCEDURE MyOperation ( intvariable INTEGER, charvariable CHAR(128) )
    URL 'HTTP://localhost/dbname/SampleWebService'
    TYPE 'SOAP:DOC';

In this example, a SOAP:DOC request is sent to the URL when you call this procedure, which would produce output similar to the following SOAP request:

<SOAP-ENV:Envelope
  xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
  xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns:m="HTTP://localhost/dbname/SampleWebService">
  <SOAP-ENV:Body>
    <m:MyOperation>
      <m:intvariable>input-integer</m:intvariable>
      <m:charvariable>input-character</m:charvariable>
    </m:MyOperation>
  </SOAP-ENV:Body>
 </SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

The procedure name appears in the <m:MyOperation> tag within the body. The two parameters to the procedure, intvariable and charvariable, become <m:intvariable> and <m:charvariable>, respectively.

By default, the stored procedure name is used as the SOAP operation name when building a SOAP request. Parameter names appear in SOAP envelope tagnames. You must reference these names correctly when defining a SOAP stored procedure since the server expects these names in the SOAP request. The SET clause can be used to specify an alternate SOAP operation name for the given procedure. WSDLC can be used to read a WSDL from a file or URL specification and generate SQL stub functions or procedures. For all but the simplest cases (ie: a SOAP RPC call returns a single string value) it is recommended that function definitions are used rather than procedures. A SOAP function returns the full SOAP response envelope which can be parsed using OPENXML.

Web service request types

Specifying an HTTP request format

Specifying a SOAP request format

See also