Mediation Flow Interfaces

Web Service Description Language (WSDL) files define the interface to a web service.

WSDL is a standard maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium; it is beyond the scope of this guide to describe WSDL syntax and functionality in detail. You can learn more about WSDL from http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl; commercial publications about Web Services and WSDL files are also available.

Mediation flows have two types of interfaces:
  • Target interfaces are interfaces to the actual services that make up your enterprise application. These interfaces appear on the right side of a mediation flow in the Mediation Flow Editor.
  • Mediation interfaces are interfaces that you expose to the consumers of your services. Mediation interfaces can have the same number and type of operations as target operations, or they can be different from the target interfaces. Mediation interfaces appear on the left side of a mediation flow in the Mediation Flow Editor.

See Mediation Flows.

Interfaces (also called port types) in mediation flows are references to abstract web services that a WSDL file defines—interfaces in a mediation flow do not have concrete bindings. The WSDL files you use in a mediation flow might have concrete bindings, but the mediation flow is concerned only with receiving the message from the mediation operation, processing the message, and forwarding it to its target operation. Binding occurs when a mediation flow is placed into an ActiveMatrix mediation component, using the Composite Editor. See Mediation Components for more information about components.

You can add the same interface more than once to either the mediation or target interface list. Adding the same interface several times to the mediation interfaces list enables you to offer the same interface to consumers with different mediation implementations.

This functionality can be used to offer different qualities of service to different consumers of the service. Adding the same interface several times to the target interfaces list enables you to bind the same interface to different providers, if you have more than one provider of the same service.