About Web Services

You can add Web services to your process apps, making their defined operations available as actions assigned to states and transitions in your application workflows. (See Using Actions for details.) To use this feature, you should be familiar with how Web services work and with the particular operations, inputs, and outputs of the Web services you are calling.

Using the Web service operation property editor, you can map each operation's inputs and outputs to application fields. In applications, Web services add capabilities to workflows that are primarily human-centered. That is, the workflows, forms, and tables are intended to structure and capture information that comes from people. Examples include issue and defect tracking.

Note: By comparison, Web services in orchestrations are organized into a workflow that is primarily machine-centered. They're arranged using control flow structures such as repeating loops, decision steps, and fault handlers. See the SBM Orchestration Guide for details.

Here are a few points to remember when using Web services in an application:

Support for development efforts writing Web services is provided by Professional Services. Questions regarding use of Web services operations in orchestration processes as documented are handled by Serena Customer Support.
Authentication for Web services is specified for the service's endpoint in either SBM Composer (in the Deploy Process App Dialog Box) or Application Repository.
Web service calls from an application are executed synchronously, which means that SBM waits for each Web service call to return (or for the specified time-out period to expire).
Note: Web service calls from an orchestration workflow are executed asynchronously, so your workflow can go on to something else after the Web service is called.
Input data is passed to the Web service in UTF-8.
Output data from the Web service is assumed to be in UTF-8.
WSDLs may fail to import if they are not formatted correctly or they contain functionality that is not supported by SBM.
All errors and Web service invocation faults are recorded to the Event Viewer on the SBM Server.

Note: You can also use the Web Services API to create integrations that create, read, update, and delete SBM items. See the Web Services Developer's Guide for an overview of the services and how to use them.