WSDL viewer

WSDL has its constructive logic, but it is hard to read / understand the content by business professionals (mostly non-programmers). Here is a small tool to visualize the web-service in a more intuitive way. I developed this transformation for WSDL interface analysis (to understand the service business functionality).

WSDL-viewer supports both WSDL 1.1 and WSDL 2.0 standards.

Please enter into the following input field the URL address of a WSDL and click on Submit.

Usage

A set of WSDL-s can be converted into web pages (HTML) in a batch process (i.e. an ANT script, that has native XSLT support).

Another elegant option is to add the userfriendly face directly into the WSDL. This way by opening the WSDL in a browser the transformation prepares on-fly the HTML view. This requires just this changes in WSDL:

The WSDL is just an XML. Adding a processing instruction can suggest the browser to use on-fly our XSLT to convert the WSDL into a "nicer" HTML page. Example of the instruction:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="http://tomi.vanek.sk/xml/wsdl-viewer.xsl"?>



<wsdl:definitions ...>

    <!-- ... Here is the service declaration ... -->

</wsdl:definitions>

The web-browsers (in Windows) are not able by default automatically recognize the .wsdl file type (suffix). For the type recognition the WSDL file has to be renamed by adding the suffix .xml - i.e. myservice.wsdl.xml.

Source code is in WSDL Viewer Github project. You can download WSDL viewer XSLT transformation. WSDL-viewer was contributed into Apache Woden project.

I hope you will find the transformation useful.

The transformation was inspired by an article of Uche Ogbuji: WSDL processing with XSLT. The use of XSLT service from W3C is inspired by an idea of CapeScience.