Question

Our application is interfacing with a lot of web services these days. We have our own package that someone wrote a few years back using UTL_HTTP and it generally works, but needs some hard-coding of the SOAP envelope to work with certain systems. I would like to make it more generic, but lack experience to know how many scenarios I would have to deal with. The variations are in what namespaces need to be declared and the format of the elements. We have to handle both simple calls with a few parameters and those that pass a large amount of data in an encoded string.

I know that 10g has UTL_DBWS, but there are not a huge number of use-cases on-line. Is it stable and flexible enough for general use? Documentation

Answer 1

I have used UTL_HTTP which is simple and works. If you face a challenge with your own package, you can probably find a solution in one of the many wrapper packages around UTL_HTTP on the net (Google ‘consuming web services from pl/sql’, leading you to e.g. http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/9i/ConsumingWebServices9i.php)

The reason nobody is using UTL_DBWS is that it is not functional in a default installed database. You need to load a ton of Java classes into the database, but the standard instructions seem to be defective – the process spews Java errors right and left and ultimately fails. It seems very few people have been willing to take the time to track down the package dependencies in order to make this approach work.