RE: Do I need a serializer ?

[Wilkins, Craig]

Title: Do I need a serializer ?

Writing your own Serializers comes down to the data types of the parameters to your SOAP Service. 

 

Don't confuse the fact that SOAP messages are in XML with the data types of the parameters that you can pass to your SOAP Service.  The SOAP API is there so you don't have to worry about the format of the SOAP message and all of the XML parsing that is involved.  You just specify the SOAP Service, create some parameter(s) and the SOAP API will contruct a SOAP Message to pass to your SOAP Server to process.

 

The serializers that come with Apache SOAP allow you to pass all sorts of data types to your SOAP Service.  The deserializers enable your SOAP Server to convert the parameters in the SOAP XML Message back into native data types for your SOAP Service to process.  The opposite is true on the SOAP reply.

 

You can pass XML as the data type of parameters in SOAP Messages.  To do so, you will need to use Literal Encoding.  This works particularly good when the parameters to your SOAP Service are very complex.  For instance, you input is a Car, but your Car contains an Engine which has all sorts of complex parts, etc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 -----Original Message-----
From: Jamie Tsao [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2002 3:22 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Do I need a serializer ?

I'm a beginner with SOAP, and have been reading a lot of documentation on it.  I'm a bit confused about whether or not I need a serializer.

What I'm trying to build:

I want to use the RPC router servlet to provide a SOAP interface to our existing platform.  Outside clients would make requests to our platform by sending XML request messages (in SOAP format).  They would receive responses also in XML.

So I basically need to take the XML message, grab the data out and instantiate a bean to pass into our existing business objects.  Is this what the deserializer is meant for ?  It doesn't seem like it.  The code that does this seems very specific to the particular format of the XML message, and seems more like DOM work to me.  When I get the response back from the business object, I have to take the data out of the javabean, and construct an XML message to be sent back to the client.  This once agains seems very specific, and NOT serializer work.

If I'm right in my assumptions, do I need a serializer/deserializer then ??

Thanks for any help.