November 12, 2001 - The WSDL's service Element

Yehuda Shiran November 12, 2001
The WSDL's service Element
Tips: November 2001

Yehuda Shiran, Ph.D.
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The service element defines the ports supported by the Web service. For each of the supported protocols, there is one port element. The service element is a collection of ports. Here is a SOAP port from the Temperature -- Weather Web service:

<service name="TemperatureService">
  <documentation>Returns current temperature in a given U.S. zipcode</documentation> 
  <port name="TemperaturePort" binding="tns:TemperatureBinding">
    <soap:address location="http://services.xmethods.net:80/soap/servlet/rpcrouter" /> 
  </port>
</service>
The binding attributes associate the address of the service with a binding element defined in the Web service. In this case, this is the TemperatureBinding binding:

<binding name="TemperatureBinding" type="tns:TemperaturePortType">
  <soap:binding style="rpc" transport="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http" /> 
    <operation name="getTemp">
      <soap:operation soapAction="" /> 
        <input>
          <soap:body use="encoded" namespace="urn:xmethods-Temperature" 
            encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" /> 
        </input>
        <output>
          <soap:body use="encoded" namespace="urn:xmethods-Temperature" 
            encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" /> 
        </output>
    </operation>
</binding>
Web service clients can learn from the service element where to access the service, through which port to access the Web service, and how the communication messages are defined.