How to consume XML Gateway WS from a remote Oracle DB (10g)?

Question

Hi,
I'm currently looking into consuming EBS web services, particularly the XML Gateway service from a remote database. For ease of use, I'm also using an Oracle 10g database.
It seems there are several ways to skin a cat though. Hope you can help.
1) Is it possible to use UTL_HTTP for this? If yes, can you please explain in detail as I have been trying to do this the past few days without success. Note, I was able to consume other web service examples, though. What url & SOAP action should I use?
2) I built a proxy client stub using JDeveloper and deployed it to the DB. However my plsql procedure doesn't execute the java class. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Charina

Answer 1

Hi Charina,
Regarding option 1), the url for the service endpoint and the value for the SOAPaction HTTP heaader are advertized in the WSDL for your service.
The value of the utl is provided by the 'location' attribute for the soap:address element within a port.
The value for the SOAPaction header is provided by the 'soapAction' attribute for the soap:operation element within a wsdl:binding/wsdl:operation element.
You can have multiple ports and bindings advertized in a single WSDL. If this is the case for you, you need to make sure that the operation you are tryin to invoke is from the SOAP binding; the one with the transport attribute set to "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http".
Here is a WSDL snippet for illustration purposes:
  <binding name="CalculatePricePort" type="tns:CalculatePricePort">
    <soap:binding transport="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http"
                  style="document"></soap:binding>
    <operation name="CalculatePrice">
      <soap:operation soapAction="document/http://siebel.com/OrderManagement/Quote/PSP:CalculatePrice"></soap:operation>
      <input>
        <soap:body use="literal"></soap:body>
      </input>
      <output>
        <soap:body use="literal"></soap:body>
      </output>
    </operation>
  </binding>
  <service name="CalculatePriceWS">
    <port binding="tns:CalculatePricePort" name="CalculatePricePort">
      <soap:address location="http://130.35.90.150/eai_enu/start.swe?SWEExtSource=SecureWebService&amp;SWEExtCmd=Execute&amp;UserName=XXXX&amp;Password=XXXX"></soap:address>
    </port>
  </service>Note that I took an example where both attributes are not using common format.
To try to get this working faster, you may want to try to use an existing JAVA (or .Net) client and compare the working payload with what is generated by the UTL_HTTP package. It's usually faster to work of a working sample that to double guess why it's not working.
Hope it helps,
-Eric