Exposing Portal Services as Web Services 

To expose a portal service as a Web service, use the Web Service Creation Wizard, which is part of the NetWeaver Developer Studio.

Prerequisites

·        The portal service must be created as part of a standalone portal application packed in a development component (DC).

When creating the DC for the portal application that will contain the portal service, select Portal Application Standalone in the new development component wizard.

·        The portal interface on which the portal service and Web service are based must be defined in the same project as the portal service.

Procedure

...

       1.      In NetWeaver Developer Studio, open the Web Services perspective.

       2.      Switch to the Portal Explorer view.

       3.      If nothing in displayed in the view, click the Filter button and choose Show DC Projects only.

       4.      Right-click the interface that you want to expose, and select New → Web Service.

The Web Service Creation Wizard is displayed. For information on running the wizard, see Web Service Creation Wizard.

The wizard requires you to specify whether the new Web service will call the current portal service using an existing alias, or whether you want to create a new alias for the service.

It is recommended that you create a new alias. This creates a new portal service based on the same interface. This enables you to set different configuration parameters, including security parameters, for the service when it is called from within the Web AS and when called via a Web service.

       5.      Build the project, which creates an .sda file.

       6.      Deploy the  .sda file via the Software Deployment Manager (SDM).

Results

The Web Service Creation Wizard creates the following files:

·        <Web Service Name>Wsd.wsdef

·        <Web Service Name>Vi.videf

·        ws-deployment-descriptor.xml

When the project is built into an .sda file and deployed, the Web AS creates a Web service based on these files. For more information on these files, see Creating a Web Service.

When a Web service call is received, the Web AS dispatches the call to a Portal Runtime application (Portal Runtime Web Service Container), which makes the required portal service call and returns the response.

Checking Deployment

The new Web service is deployed to the Web AS. To check the deployment, open the Web Services Navigator to view all the Web services deployed to the Web AS.

The Web Services Navigator is located at http://<server>:<port>/wsnavigator.