Web Service Advisor View

The Dimension Designer's Web Service Advisor view is designed to assist the user in developing and deploying Web services by monitoring the validation and deployable state of their VDB and identifying any errors or incomplete steps in the process of building a Web service.

The view contains two sections titled Current Status and Related Guides.

Current Status Section

In order to create and deploy a web service WAR file, a valid VDB must be created containing:

- One or more relational sources
- One or more XML View model
- Input and Output XML Schema (XSD) models
- One or more Web service models (see Web Service Overview )

The Current Status section of the Web Service Advisor displays a checklist of the different modeling steps necessary to define a functional Web service and deploy this WAR file in Dimension Designer.

An empty checkbox next to any item means that this step in the Web service modeling process has yet to be completed. A red X in the checkbox indicates that there are validation errors or other problems associated with the step. Tooltips are also available which summarize category status. Just hover over the check-box icon or category title.

The following checkboxes are displayed:

- Model Validation when checked indicates that the workspace is free of validation errors in any models.
- Sources checks for the existence of data source models in your VDB.
- Connector bindings validates that a connector binding has been defined for each source model in the VDB.
- XML View Mappings validates that the necessary XML View models exist to provide mappings for the Web Service operations from your data sources to XML formats. Any errors in the XML View mappings will be indicated by a red X in the checkbox.
- XML Schema verifies that the appropriate XML Schema models exist and are correctly referenced by the Web service operations and XML View models.
- Web services checks for the existence of valid Web service operations and procedures.

Two actions below the checkboxes become available once a valid Web service has been fully defined.

- Preview WSDL generates a sample Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) document describing your Web service
- Create Web Service WAR File generates the WAR file to be deployed to a servlet container.

In addition to monitoring status, the Web Service Advisor also provides users a list of available actions for each category. Selecting the icon for a given category will present a dialog containing available actions related to the selected category.

Related Guides Section

The Related Guides section of the Web Service Advisor provides a list of step-by-step guides you can use for generating Web services starting from the data source layer, or from an XML Schema or XML View model, or from an existing WSDL definition. These guides are termed "cheat sheets" in the application to adhere to the Eclipse convention. (See Using Cheat Sheets .)

Related Topics

- Create a New VDB
- Using Dimension Guides
- Web Services at a glance
- Getting Started with Metamatrix Dimension

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