Publishing OWB Transformations As Web Services
June 16th, 2004 by Mark Rittman
There’s an interesting technical note available on OTN on invoking
OWB processes or mappings as web services.
Traditionally, OWB mappings and processes are run using the OWB deployment
manager, SQL*Plus (using the Execution Template) or through Oracle Enterprise
Manager. However, from OWB 9.0.4 onwards, mappings and process flows can be called
by any application that can communicate via a web service interface.
The way this is accomplished is to create a PL/SQL procedure that accepts a
set of input parameters, calls the OWB mapping or process, and outputs the
results as output parameters. This procedure is then published as a PL/SQL web
service using Oracle JDeveloper, and the web service is then deployed to a J2EE
application server such as Oracle OC4J or Apache Tomcat.
The article describes
a scenario where an OWB mapping is put together that takes as it’s input a
customer address, cleanses the address using the name and address
transformation, then outputs the cleaned up address as output parameters. This
mapping is then published as a web service and can be called by any J2EE or .NET
application, allowing you to deploy and use OWB’s transformation capabilities
outside of the normal OWB environment. The article comes with a sample .mdl
export and PL/SQL
package files and full instructions on how to set up your own OWB web
service. Well worth a look.
