Antonio Fiol Bonn�n wrote:
I'm not so certain that my approach is better. When I designed the stuff, my first idea was to write something like what you describe. The advantage with my approach is that you can embed the web service call in an XML document that contains other stuff and that you can make several web service calls at once. The disadvantage is that if you have to embed your message to the web service in XML tags and strip of XML tags from the output. For many use cases you don't need the flexibility you get from my approach, it just complicates thing. If your input and/or output documents from the web service are large it can also be quite costly to add and strip away tags.I have implemented something like that, see:
http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24402. It is not yet
part of Cocoon as we have differing opinions about the design as you can
see in the Bugzilla entry and also in the thread:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=109085126300004&r=1&w=2.
Thank you Daniel.
My approach was, in fact, much simpler.
It is a very simple transformer. You can configure (in the sitemap, src attribute for the transform element) the URL to post to. Everything in the input is posted. The response is piped back "alone", without anything around.
Of course, your approach is probably much better.
So as a conclusion I think that your approach would make a usefull adition to Cocoon. If you use the "postable" http source that I submitted in the Bugzilla entry, It would be quite easy to write, (read the thread cited above first for other opinions, however).
Another thing tha might be worth mentioning is that if you need more detailed error control or need to do some decisions based on the output, it is often better to call the web service from a flowscript, (you can find some example code in the bugzilla entry).
/Daniel
