SOAP Adapter

SOAP defines the XML-based message format that applications use to communicate and inter-operate with each other over the Web.

The heterogeneous environment of the Web demands that applications support a common data encoding protocol and message format.

SOAP is a standard for encoding messages in XML that invoke functions in other applications running on any hardware platform regardless of different operating systems or programming languages. It is analogous to Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) used in many technologies such as Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), but eliminates some of the complexities of using these interfaces.

The SOAP Adapter supports the SOAP 1.1 protocol as defined by http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/.

Use the SOAP Adapter to help to create SOAP request messages and to interpret response messages. The SOAP Adapter does not handle the delivery of messages and should be used with a transport adapter, such as HTTP, to deliver the request and receive the response message.

When you send a SOAP-based HTTP request, the default encoding of the content of the HTTP request is ISO-8859-1. The SOAP adapter requires a UTF-8 encoded response from the HTTP server, but the request can be in any Western or UTF-8 encoded format. See the description of the -TYPE command in the HTTP adapter documentation for details about how to specify the encoding.

The adapter has the following capabilities:

  • Adds SOAP envelopes if they are not provided
  • Parses the response message to extract scalar data elements
  • Removes envelope and simplifies the form of SOAP responses to aid mapping of the response data
  • Understands fault codes and interprets them as map failures

The SOAP Adapter does not provide a listener. The transport adapter provides this functionality.