Calling external web services in Metastorm

Does anyone have any hints for successfully calling web services in Metastorm 9.1?

We're currently trialling Integration Builder and haven't been able to get them to work together. We can issue the login call, but are not sure where\how the session ID is being stored - and we need the session ID in order to issue the other web services calls including the log out. We've set it up as a Connection with a Web Service type, the Methods & Parameters populate and we can promote the calls, but just can't seem to get them to work. Any tips and tricks for a newbie?

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Comments

Nils Wyldbore

Rebecca,

The first and most important tip I can give you is to write your web service integration code in Visual Studio first.

MBPM is not a good place to develop and debug your code. If you can get it right in VS, then you stand a chance of then integrating it into MBPM.

Only thing to note is that when you generate the proxies in VS, make sure you generate MVC ones and not classic web service proxies. MBPM will generate MVC ones and if you do the others, you will be wasting code and time (and I say this from bitter experience).

Good luck!

Nils.

Rebecca Maude

Thanks Nils, although I'm not actually writing the web services. They've already been written in Integration Builder - I'm just trying to invoke them from MetaStorm. I'm sure I'm probably just trying to call them in the wrong way, I was hoping someone here had already linked the two products and could let me know the best way to get them to talk to each other (other than straight database triggers)

Apperson_Rory

Rebecca,

I believe what Nils meant was that you build the code you're going to use from Metastorm -- the code that connects to and uses the web service -- in Visual Studio first. As he pointed out, Metastorm is a lousy place to debug any code, and Visual Studio provides much better facilities for getting your interaction with the web service right before transferring it back to Metastorm.

We use Integration Builder, and I've also successfully called IB web services from .NET code (which is essentially what you'd be doing with the scripting in Metastorm) that I wrote in Visual Studio. The way you handle the session is that you create a class-level field to hold the session ID that is returned from the call to the web service login method.

Let me know if you need any more information, and I'd be happy to help.

-Rory