XSLT Cookbook

Serving SOAP Documentation from WSDL

Problem

You are using SOAP and WSDL to build a service-based enterprise architecture. You want developers to be able to find complete and pertinent information on available services.

Solution

This solution constructs a WSDL-based service documentation server: a service that provides information about services.^[29] This example will use a Perl-based CGI that invokes XSLT processing on a single WSDL file containing or including information about all services available in an enterprise. Here the CGI invokes the XSLT processor in a system call. This clumsy setup is good for prototyping but not production use. A better solution would use the Perl modules XML::LibXML and XML::LibXSLT. An even better architecture would use a more sophisticated server-side XSLT-enabled solution such as Cocoon. To focus on the XSLT and WSDL aspects of this example, and not the CGI architecture, we took a simplistic approach.

The site’s main page is generated by a CGI that shows the user available services and ports. See the discussion for explanations of services and ports. It uses the following Perl CGI frontend to Saxon:

#!c:/perl/bin/perl 
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n" ;
system "saxon StockServices.wsdl wsdlServiceList.xslt" ;

The transformation builds a form containing all available services, ports, bindings, and port types:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" ...