Create endpoint references using the Web Services Addressing support

WebSphere Application Server provides interfaces for you to create endpoint references. Endpoint references are a primary concept of the Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing) interoperability protocol, and provide a standard mechanism to encapsulate information about specific Web service endpoints. This task is a subtask of Creating a Web service application that is referenced through a Web Services Addressing endpoint reference.

Overview

You can also specify the behavior of endpoint references in a cluster environment.

Procedure

• To create an endpoint reference with an address that you specify directly, use the WS-Addressing EndpointReferenceManager.createEndpointReference(URI address) method of the system programming interface (SPI) provided. This method is useful in test scenarios, where the address of the service does not change.

• To create an endpoint reference with an address that is automatically generated by WebSphere Application Server, perform the following steps.

  1. If you created the Web service deployment descriptor file, webservices.xml, manually, ensure that the webservice-description-name in the file is the same as the local part of the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) service name. If you generated the webservices.xml file using the tools provided, the names match by default. This match is required for the generation of the correct URI for the endpoint reference.

  2. Create the endpoint reference using the method that is appropriate for the object that the reference will represent:

     • If you are creating an endpoint reference to represent a stateful session bean that maintains in-memory state, create the endpoint reference using the EndpointReferenceManager.createEndpointReference(QName serviceName, String endpointName, Remote statefulSessionBean) method of the application programming interface (API) provided. This method ensures that requests are targeted at the specific server that hosts the stateful session bean instance, and are not workload-managed.

       Also, if high availability for stateful session beans is specified, the endpoint reference remains valid even if the stateful session bean is failed over.

       If the statefulSessionBean parameter is null, requests are targeted directly at the server that hosts the endpoint and are not workload-managed, but there is no stateful session bean failover capability.

     • If you are creating an endpoint reference to represent any other object, create the endpoint reference using the EndpointReferenceManager.createEndpointReference(QName serviceName, String endpointName) method of the API. The combination of service name and endpoint name must be unique in the server. If there is more than one Web service application with the same service name and endpoint name, the application server cannot generate a unique URI object for the endpoint. If you cannot ensure that the combination of service name and endpoint name is unique, use an SPI method to create the endpoint reference.

       Because the endpoint reference might be workload-managed at a later date, ensure that the endpoint does not contain any in-memory state.

     When the application invokes either of the previous two methods, WebSphere Application Server generates the address URI for the endpoint reference, and puts the service name and endpoint name into the metadata of the newly created endpoint reference.

     Note: If you configured a virtual host for the server on which the endpoint is created, the URI of the endpoint reference refers to the virtual host of the HTTP server's configuration. You can override the HTTP endpoint URL information using the administrative console. The methods described previously will use the overridden value to generate the address URI for the endpoint reference.

Results

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Related concepts

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