Discovering and invoking a web service
About this task
To invoke a web service in the designer, you discover the service and select the operations that you want to use. Then, set the server that contains the configuration properties that are required to invoke the service. An external service is generated containing the operations that you selected in the discovered service and a reference to the server that you selected. Business objects are also generated based on the WSDL definition.
Service providers update their services periodically, and you might want to rediscover the updated service so that you can use it. When you discover a service, if an external service discovered from the same URL already exists in the designer, you can either overwrite the existing service or create a new one. To get the updated version of the web service, replace the external service. If you have a service task that calls the external service, the operations and data mappings are preserved, unless the operation or data is not included in the new version. If the server connection information is unchanged, you can keep the reference to the server information.
Complete the following steps to discover an existing web service with a WSDL definition and generate an external service that you can use in a service flow.