Deploying Service Archives

The WSO2 SOA platform has the capability of Axis2 to deploy a service as an archive file. You can bundle all your service-related resources, service classes, and third-party libraries and then deploy the archive file.

To deploy the service, all you have to do is locate the archive file and upload it.

Uploading Service Archive Files

To upload your service archive file, you first need to have all the class files and the service.xml files in the archive directory. Thereafter, you can create the archive file.

The folder structure of the service archive file will be as follows.

Test.aar

META-INF

Services.xml

Test.class

Figure 1: Uploading service archive files

  1. In the navigator, under Manage/Services, click AAR Service. The Add Service Archives window appears.
  2. Provide the hierarchical path of the service. This is optional. If you want to manage services separately, specifying a heirarchy is important. This allows you to customise your service EPR as you wish. And also it allows you to manage multiple versions of the same service changing only the business logic.

    Example: Consider a service "Version"

    If no service hierarchy -> EPR is ../services/Version

    With service hierarchy foo/bar/1.0.0 -> EPR is ../services/foo/bar/1.0.0/Version

  3. Click Browse to locate the file you want to upload.
  4. Click Upload. The Deployed Services page appears. Subsequently, if the service is successful, it will appear in the Service Groups table. If the service is faulty, a Faulty Service Groups link will appear. You can click the link to view the errors.

Testing the Service

A successful service can be easily tested through the user interface.Several options are available to control your service.

Figure 2: Service dashboard

  1. In the navigator, under Manage/Services, click List. The Deployed Services page appears.
  2. Click on the service name you want to test. The Service Dashboard page appears.
  3. Click Try the service on the Client Operations panel.
  4. A page with your service name appears. It contains the operations available for your service.
  5. Give the parameters for the operations you want to invoke.
  6. Click Send button at the bottom of the window.

Figure 3: Try the Service

Note: Instead of using this user interface, you can also manually place the .aar containing all the required files into CARBON_HOME/repository/services. These archive files can be deployed as services.

Generating the Client

You can generate the client for your service using the WSDL2Java tool in WSO2 Application Server (WSO2 AS).

Figure 4: Generating the client

  1. In the navigator, under Manage/Services, click List. The Deployed Services page will appear.
  2. Click on the service name for which you want to generate the client.The Service Dashboard page appears.
  3. Click Generate Axis2 Client. The WSDL2Java page appears.
  4. Enter or select the appropriate values in the WSDL2Java page.
  5. Click Generate.