I have the task of exposing a SOAP service in Outsystems that matches an existing (non-Outsystems) service exactly. The idea behind this is that the calling client should only need to change the endpoint to switch over to 'my' service.
I run into a problem that I'll explain with a small example.
The incoming message is a structure (MessageIn) that contains a text attribute (ItemLabel) and an attribute (ItemContents) which is a list of another structure (ItemContent). So the data type of ItemContents is ItemContent List. An ItemContent contains two simple attributes.
When I test my service with this incoming message, I need to put this in the XML to get it parsed correctly by the platform:
<MessageIn>
<ItemLabel>string</ItemLabel>
<ItemContents>
<ItemContent>
<ItemWaarde>string</ItemWaarde>
<ItemBedrag>0</ItemBedrag>
</ItemContent>
</ItemContents>
</MessageIn>
I want to be able to send the following XML to my service, because that's what the original service expects, so with the ItemContents tag removed:
I don't know how to achieve this. I noticed that the XMLRecords extension has a config setting (RecordMode "C" or "S") in the action RecordToXML that can achieve exactly this when creating XML from a structure. RecordMode "C" will create the first sample above, "S" will create the second one. But what I want to do is the other way around and furthermore I don't know how the access the raw XML before it is parsed by the platform.
Any clues in what direction to look?
Hello Gerard,
I have asked the MVPs (let's see if someone has something to say about this) and maybe someone else has already run into this problem and has an easier solution.
But I think the only solution is to use an external web service that will receive the requests and answer in the format required, working as a middle layer (translator) between the requester and the OutSystems web service.
I know that this is far from ideal. But I really fail here in seeing how to do what is needed from a pure OutSystems way...
Let's see if anyone else has some solution for this.
Cheers.
What seems to work, but also far from ideal, is to expose my service as a REST service and just receive the entire SOAP envelope in the request body.
Gerard Neele wrote:
Yes. It is a possibility.
Another one is to expose through an Extension. Accordingly to the documentation, this is possible, but I never did it.
In any case, what gives you less headache to implement the logic is the best option.
I'll give the extension option some attention, thanks.