Web Service/XML-RPC: SMTP to BC4J web service bridge ??

Question

A new business problem just landed on my desk for a possible solution.
One way XML documents coming in from a Novel mail server doing SMTP forward to something
in the OC4J, BC4J, side to receive and parse the XML.
It would be great of course if the JDev / OC4J web services tools had a SMTP service
that would route inbound SMTP messages at email address to a particular Servlet.post().
Any other ideas??
Thanks much,
curt

Answer 1

I don't have answer for the SMTP binding as currently the Oracle9iAS J2EE Web Services engine doesn't support an SMTP binding (checking with product management to see if their is any solution today). I suspect this is a manual exercise parsing the SMTP message and extracting the SOAP message.
However with BC4J you do get in Oracle9i JDeveloper 9.0.2 the ability to consume/publish SOAP messages. And the readXML and writeXML methods on the BC4J view objects help deal with the content of your SOAP messages. So some of the work has been done for you.
If you haven't seen this already, here is what the publishing side looks like. First, if you build a remote method in your <applicationModule>impl.java file with a signature like (everything in "<xxx>" is specific to your implementation), you can publish it as a Web service. For example:
import org.w3c.dom.*;
import oracle.xml.parser.v2.*;
public org.w3c.dom.Element getBC4JXMLDocument (String parm) {
get<some BC4J view>().setWhereClause("<some column from your BC4J view>" = parm);
// Assuming your column is a String :-)
get<some BC4J view>().setWhereClauseParam(0, parm);
return (Element)get<some BC4J view>().writeXML(1,Row.XML_OPT_ALL_ROWS);
Then publish the application module method as a Web service (see: http://otn.oracle.com/products/ids/daily/may10.html)
It is pretty easy to build a client from the WSDL that is generated using the JDev wizards. Once you have the stub your code would look something like:
import org.w3c.dom.*;
import oracle.xml.parser.v2.*;
org.w3c.dom.Element x = stub.getBC4JXMLDocument("your_parameter");
XSLProcessor l_processor = new XSLProcessor();
XSLStylesheet l_xsl = l_processor.newXSLStylesheet(this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("some.xsl"));
l_processor.showWarnings(true);
l_processor.setErrorStream(System.err);
DocumentFragment l_result = l_processor.processXSL(l_xsl,(XMLElement)e);
// now feed the transformed XML document into the receiving BC4J view object using the readXML method
The neat thing, which I think is the gist of your message, is that you could then use the BC4J readXML message to parse the incoming XML message and inflate it back into a BC4J view object. The net result would be moving an entire dataset over SOAP to a BC4J client.
The SMTP binding would have to worked into the stub code generated. I don't have sample code that would help here right now but will check around.
Mike.