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Use

Services Registry represents a registry for Web services. Located centrally within a SOA landscape, it contains information about services provided in that landscape, with references to the services' relevant WSDL metadata and to the locations of the callable service endpoints. The registered services are classified using semantic-rich classification systems to enable browsing of services by classification.

Services Registry is a central place for developers to find available Web services they can reuse. Administrators can find available service endpoints and manage connections between consumer and provider systems. Services Registry provides support for SAP and non-SAP applications.

Services Registry ensures visibility in an SOA landscape providing answers to questions such as:

  • Where are services located in the landscape?

  • Which services are modeled but not yet implemented?

  • Which services are already configured and can be invoked?

  • Who uses services I have published to the Services Registry?

  • How can I inform Web services consumers about changes of services?

Structure

At the core of Services Registry is an open standard UDDI v3.0 conformant registry. Users can publish content into the UDDI registry at design time, at deployment time, and at configuration time. The UDDI publication is achieved in accordance with established Web service standard practices. Thus Services Registry is completely open to the non-SAP world.

To support classification and browsing in the user interfaces, Services Registry offers a classification service. This service provides the metadata on different classification systems, and the content of each classification system. This includes the possible values with descriptive text and hierarchic structural information, where applicable. The classification service supports the dynamic addition of values to a classification system.

Integration

  • Services Registry is intended to be the central place in a SOA landscape where the services of an enterprise are shared.

    You need only one central Enterprise Services Repository and Registry in your landscape. It can be shared across multiple development and productive systems, a Process Integration instance, and third-party software.

  • Services Registry enables you to discover and retrieve services and to use them in composite applications.

    That means applications make use of data and functions provided as services by underlying applications and combine these into coherent business scenarios.

    For more information about using Services Registry in AS Java, see Connecting the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio to the Services Registry .

  • To make searching for services easier, the development environments in the SAP landscape provide a user interface for querying Services Registry.

    Developers can directly browse Services Registry and retrieve the WSDL file of the service that has been selected for consumption.

  • Based on the UDDI v3 standard for publishing and discovering services, Services Registry offers interoperable third-party tools.

    The integration with external tools allows you to extend your SOA landscape to third-party offerings. For example, you can do the following:

    • Retrieve and publish services from MS Visual Studio using SAP ES Explorer for .Net.

    • Integrate other UDDI-based registries.

    • Access the UDDI server with UDDI clients that conform to the UDDI v3 specification.

    For more information, see Interoperability with Services Registry .

  • Services Registry is an optional component of an SAP NetWeaver landscape. The consumption of services does not necessarily have to be based on services found in the registry.

Features

  • Providers can publish their services in the registry.

    Providers access Services Registry to publish SAP services and external services, making services available centrally. The primary method for publishing service definitions is to use the corresponding tools provided by the development infrastructure where you develop services. When you need to publish third-party services, you can do this directly in Services Registry. For more information, see Publishing Service Definitions Using the Services Registry .

  • Consumers can discover the services that need to be consumed.

    Consumers access Services Registry to discover services in your landscape by searching by service name or browsing by classification.

  • By providing well-structured content, Services Registry facilitates the governance of services in your landscape.

    You can classify SAP services and external services directly in Services Registry using both predefined classifications and your own classifications. You can use classifications to govern the user access to services.

  • You can manage your SOA landscape by creating entities for SOA management.

    Within Services Registry, you can define your own classifications, create and assign permissions, and find where a service is used.

  • You can make sure the registered SAP services and external services work correctly using the integrated test environment.

More Information