SOAP APIs¶

Web services are building blocks for creating open, distributed systems. A web service is a collection of functions that are packaged as a single unit and published to a network for use by other software programs. For example, you could create a web service that checks a customer’s credit or tracks delivery of a package. If you want to provide higher-level functionality, such as a complete order management system, you could create a web service that maps to many different Integrations, each performing a separate order management function.

A SOAP API defines a web service and it encapsulates all the information of a web service. The SOAP API contains the message formats, data types, transport protocols, and transport serialization formats that should be used between the consumer (requester) and the provider of the web service. The SOAP API represents an agreement governing the mechanics of interacting with that service.

MindConnect Integration allows you to write integration logic to integrate different types of applications. This logic can be exposed to the external world using SOAP APIs. A SOAP API is a service provided to external users.

An operation is the WSDL element that exposes some functions of a web service and defines how data is passed back and forth. A SOAP API exposes one or more Integrations as operations, so each operation in a SOAP API corresponds to an Integration. The input for the Integration corresponds to the request body for the operation. The output of the Integration is the response body for the operation.

Using a SOAP client, you can invoke the SOAP operation externally by using either Basic Authentication or 2-way SSL. When the SOAP operation is invoked, the associated Integration gets executed.