Generating and viewing WSDL files

NexJ CRM allows SOAP access to a number of its fundamental classes, and allows you to generate the WSDL information for those services through a web browser.

In order to generate the WSDL information for the SOA services, you need access to a running instance of NexJ CRM. To view the resulting WSDL file in a user-friendly display, you need an XSL transform file that transforms the WSDL to the format you want. These instructions assume that you are using the wsdl-viewer.xsl, which you can download at: http://tomi.vanek.sk/xml/wsdl-viewer.xsl.

The first step of the following task provides instructions on producing the WSDL file. The remainder of the task provides a method for producing a more user-friendly rendering of that data.

These rendering instructions use the Mozilla Firefox browser's ability to run XSL transforms automatically from within the browser. If you have another method of carrying out XSL transforms, or an alternative XSL transform for styling WSDL information, you can use them instead.

For a full list of publicly available SOA definitions, see Available SOA definitions.

To generate and view the WSDL information for one of the NexJ CRM SOA services:

1. Open your browser and enter the URL for the SOAP that you want to generate a WSDL for.
   The URL will be of the form https://<application-server>/<context-root>/soa/<soa-id>/soap where:
   • <application-server> is the URL of a running instance of NexJ CRM
   • <context-root> is the context-root for the instance of NexJ CRM that you want to read the SOAP information for
   • <soa-id> is the full identifier of the SOA protocol that you want to read information for
   For example, if you were running NexJ CRM in a default nexj context on example.com, and wanted to see the SOA definition for the Note class, you would use the following URL: https://example/nexj/soa/nexj:crm:Note:1.0/soap
2. Save the resulting XML file.
3. Open the file in a text editor.

4. Add a stylesheet reference to the WSDL viewer XSL by adding the following line just after the XML declaration: <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="wsdl-viewer.xsl"?>. This assumes that the wsdl-viewer.xsl file is in the same folder as the WSDL file. For example, the following code snippet is taken from a saved version of the WSDL for the Note class. In this example, bold styling indicates the added stylesheet reference.

   XML

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="wsdl-viewer.xsl"?>
   <definitions name="Note" targetNamespace="http://www.nexj.com/xml/nexj/crm/Note/1.0/interface/Note" 
   xmlns="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" xmlns:ns="http://www.nexj.com/xml/soa" 
   xmlns:ns-0="http://www.nexj.com/xml/nexj/crm/Note/1.0/type/collections" 
   xmlns:ns-1="http://www.nexj.com/xml/nexj/soa/BaseSOATypeLibrary/1.0/type" 
   xmlns:ns-2="http://www.nexj.com/xml/sys" xmlns:ns-3="http://www.nexj.com/xml/nexj/crm/Note/1.0/type" 
   xmlns:nstp="http://www.nexj.com/xml/nexj/crm/Note/1.0/interface/Note/soap" xmlns:soapbind="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/" 
   xmlns:tns="http://www.nexj.com/xml/nexj/crm/Note/1.0/interface/Note" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

5. Save the file.
6. Open the XML file in Mozilla Firefox. You may also be able to open the file in other browsers. However, the WSDL provides the most consistent results when used with Mozilla Firefox.

The WSDL for the specific SOA protocol displays in a standard readable format.

Available SOA definitions

The following SOA definitions are available to allow you to interact with classes in the NexJ Finance model