Testing the Web Services Interface
To test your Web services application
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Set up the application as a Web-enabled application so that the Web Application Monitor window is displayed when you run the application.
If your Web-enabled application is not the current active application in the Application Browser, use the Set command from the Application menu to set it to the current active application.
Alternatively, you can use the Set As Default check box in the Run Application dialog.
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Ensure that your workstation has the virtual directory specified in step 7 under "Defining a Web Services Provider Application", earlier in this chapter, defined as a virtual directory in Internet Information Services (accessed from the Internet Services Manager command on the Control Panel Administrative Tools submenu). For more details, see "
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Select the Open Browser command from the Web Application Monitor utility File menu. (For details, see "
Your default browser (for example, Microsoft Internet Explorer) is then started and a browser session connects to the application.
The browser displays a sample home page for your application, as shown in the following example of the Erewhon system.
In the following images in this subsection, which provide further examples of the Web browser when testing a Web services application, only the form is displayed; that is, the menu, tools, and address bars are not included in the images.
The Web services form is displayed when you click on the getClient method. A text box is displayed for each parameter in the method signature. For example, the getClient method (described under "Creating Web Service Methods", earlier in this chapter) has one parameter; that is, clientName, which has a String value.
Specify a value (for example, Brian Olsen) in the clientName text box, as shown in the following image, and then click the Invoke button.
This action sends the request to JADE as a HTTP POST message and displays the message response, which is a summary of the returned XML document, as shown in the following image.
On the Web form, click the here hyperlink to display all of the XML document or click the schema hyperlink to display the next level in a new Web browser window. The Web browser form shown in the following image displays the first portion of the full XML document.
Not all Web service methods can be tested this way. As methods that require objects as input cannot be tested by using the Web browser interface, write a client application to test this, if required. For example, the following image shows the results of selecting the updateClient method (which takes a Client object as input) from the Web browser.
You can also display the XML document view (that is, the raw XML from the Web service) when testing your application in the Web browser.
The following image is an example of the first portion of the XML that is displayed when you click the here hyperlink on the Erewhon system sample home page (shown in the first image in this subsection), to indicate that you want to view the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
‘Strange’ characters that may be displayed when you view the WSDL for you application indicate the base64 equivalent of a binary property photo. In this release, all binary data is converted to base64 format.
Null primitive data values in Web service output are built as <tag/> for String primitive types and as <tag>value</tag> for all other data types. Null or invalid Date and TimeStamp values are sent as "1900-01-01".
