Limitations of Web services

This file contains a comprehensive list of limitations, both permanent and temporary, that affect Web services.

The limitations that you may encounter while working with Web services are divided into the following sections:

Supported software and specifications

The Web Services Explorer supports the following Web browsers:

  • Microsoft® Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher
  • Mozilla 1.2.1 or higher

If you are launching the WORF test environment outside the workbench using Mozilla, a Mozilla version of at least 1.3.1 is recommended. Output from invoking your web service as well as description files may not be rendered correctly in earlier versions of the Mozilla browser.

Problems encountered when using the Web Services wizards

Problems encountered when using WebSphere run-time environment

Problems with using Apache Axis 1.0 run-time environment

Permanent Limitations when using IBM SOAP run-time environment

The IBM SOAP run-time environment should be use mainly for backward compatibility reasons. It is strongly suggested that you use the Web services wizard with the IBM WebSphere run-time environment for all production purposes. When using the Web services wizard with the IBM SOAP run-time environment, the user may run into the following permanent limitations:

Limitations when creating a Web service client

Web Services Explorer problems

Private UDDI Registry problems

DADX Web services

The following restrictions apply when generating a WSDL document from a DADX file:

In a DADX group you can specify a JDBC net driver. For DB2® the net driver class is COM.ibm.db2.jdbc.net.DB2Driver. For earlier versions of DB2, db2java.zip needed to be added to the server classpath, and this zip file contains the driver. However, with DB2 version 8.1 and later, the file db2jcc.jar also needs to be added to the server classpath. The file is usually located in the same directory as the db2java.zip file. Ensure that The DB2 client level on your machine is at the same fixpack level as the DB2 server that you are connecting to.

Multiple outputs in DADX Web services: Normally, multiple outputs in a Web service is not supported by our tools. However, in the case of DADX Web services, multiple outputs are allowed if the Use Document Style group property is set to true. In this case, when document style is true, multiple outputs are combined together into a single XML document.

DADX generation support: Although user defined functions are listed in the Generate DADX wizard, there is currently no support for generating DADX from user defined functions. Support is only available for DADX generation from DAD files, stored procedures and SQL statements. Selecting a UDF will cause a simple DADX skeleton file to be generated.

Setting up a DADX group with datasource information:If the WebSphere Application Server is being used to host a DADX Web service and the DADX group is configured to access the database via a datasource, then the group.properties file for the DADX group should use the following initialContextFactory property: initialContextFactory=com.ibm.websphere.naming.WsnInitialContextFactory

Also, the web.xml file for the project containing the DADX group needs to have the following added. (Given that the datasource JNDI name is jdbc/hospital.)
<resource-ref id="ResourceRef_1058550453092">
<res-ref-name>jdbc/hospital</res-ref-name>
<res-type>javax.sql.DataSource</res-type>
<res-auth>CONTAINER</res-auth>
<res-sharing-scope>Shareable</res-sharing-scope>
</resource-ref>

Using the Universal Test Client

Using Tomcat server with AXIS run-time environment

If using Tomcat 4.1 and 4.0 servers that have Web applications using Axis installed on Linux, you may encounter an error in the Web services wizards. If the server was started and requires a restart aat some point in Web services wizard, the wizard may hang because Axis blocks the Tomcat server from stopping.

The workaround is to stop the server before starting the Web service wizard and deselecting "Run on Server" on the wizard page that generates the test Web service application.

Problems when using Web services command line

Importing WSDL files with HTTP basic Authentication

When generating skeletons or clients from a WSDL file that has relative imports and is HTTP Basic Authentication protected, the user will see an error message indicating that the WSDL file cannot be resolved even if the correct user ID and password are entered. The problem is that the user ID and password are only used to retrieve the original WSDL file, and not the files that it imports.

To overcome this problem, the user can download the WSDL file and all the files that it imports to the workbench first, and then generate skeleton or client from the downloaded WSDL file.

Resource preferences not observed

When using the Apache Axis 1.0 run-time environment, the Axis emitters re-generate every time all the server/client Java files, deploy.wsdd and undeploy.wsdd. WSDL2Java for the service generation scenario will only generate the skeleton implementation file if it does not already exist. If this implementation already exists, it will not be overwritten.

Problems encountered when working in a Team Development Environment

When Web projects are being shared in a ClearCase® team environment, several Add to Source Control dialogs will open during Web service and Web service client creation if the Web service run-time environment selected is IBM WebSphere or Apache Axis 1.0. In order to suppress these dialogs, do the following:
  1. From the Window menu, select Preferences
  2. Expand Team in the left-hand pane. Select ClearCase.
  3. In the right-hand pane, change the value of the drop-down labeled When new resources are added to Automatically add to source control.
  4. Click OK.
  5. Go to ClearCase > Set Current Activity.
  6. In the dialog that opens, select a default activity. Click OK.

Web services cheat sheet

In the Create ,test and validate a WS-I compliant Web Service Cheat sheet and Create a Web Service from a WSDL file CheatSheet, if you are using the HelloService.wsdl file from the wsad_install/wstools/eclipse/plugins/com.ibm.etools.cs.wsdl.content_ver/examples, please modify the service port location according to the different run-time environment as follows:

For IBM SOAP:

location="http://localhost:9080/HelloWorldSample/servlet/rpcrouter"

For Apache Axis or WebSphere run-time environment

location="http://localhost:9080/HelloWorldSample/services/Hello_Port"

If you are importing your own wsdl file, make sure that the location is set properly according to the run-time environment selected as mentioned above.

Supply Chain Management sample cannot be run

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