Eventually, you should also decide how you want to distribute the WSDL file for your Web service to your end users. Some methods are more public than others. How end users access the WSDL can affect the security of your Web service. Some of the ways that you can distribute a WSDL file are the following:
Use e-mail
Post it on a Web server
Host it in a UDDI directory
Note: When the WSDL specification was first proposed, UDDI directories were intended to be the primary method of distributing the WSDL files for public Web services. Most major companies, like Microsoft and IBM, have since abandoned the concept.
You can also host the file on a network using a WSA by deploying the Web service using the OpenEdge Web services tools. This deployed WSDL file resides at a URL determined by the WSA installation and other information specified for the Web service at deployment. Once the Web service is deployed, the WSA administrator can make the WSDL available by enabling access to WSDL listings on the network. For more information on Web service deployment, see the Web service chapters of OpenEdge Application Server: Administration.
To obtain a WSDL file deployed to a WSA instance, you can download it over the network through its URL, specified using the following syntax:
For example, here is a WSDL retrieval URL for a Web service with the friendly name, OrderInfo, that is deployed to a WSA instance (wsa1) running in the WSA Web application context (wsa):
For more information on the syntax of the WSDL retrieval URL, see the chapters on the WSA in OpenEdge Application Server: Administration.
Note: To aid developing client code for testing Web services under development, you can optionally generate a WSDL file from ProxyGen when generating pre-deployment versions of the Web service definition. ProxyGen writes this file to the specified output directory. For more information, see OpenEdge Development: Open Client Introduction and Programming.
Use e-mail