ColdFusion and ASP.NET Web Service Interoperability, Part III

Yesterday I described some of the problems I was having getting ColdFusion to talk to an ASP.NET web service as well as a brute force solution to the issue. Well my former co-worker Phil Duba left a comment on that post pointing to the follwing article: Notes on Interfacing ColdFusion MX to External Web Services Requiring Complex-within-Complex XML Documents as Input. This article turned out to be the key to my getting this web service call to work using <cfinvoke>.

First let me give a little more detail. Here is a sample of the WSDL I was working with:

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

<wsdl:definitions xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/" xmlns:tm="http://microsoft.com/wsdl/mime/textMatching/" xmlns:soapenc="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" xmlns:mime="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/mime/" xmlns:tns="http://tempuri.org/" xmlns:s="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap12="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap12/" xmlns:http="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/http/" targetNamespace="http://tempuri.org/" xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/">

  <wsdl:types>

    <s:schema elementFormDefault="qualified" targetNamespace="http://tempuri.org/">

      <s:element name="Company_Add">

        <s:complexType>

          <s:sequence>

            <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="txtCompanyName" type="s:string"/>

            <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="txtCompanyAddress1" type="s:string"/>

            <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="txtCompanyAddress2" type="s:string"/>

            <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="txtCompanyZip" type="s:string"/>

            <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="txtCompanyFax" type="s:string"/>

          </s:sequence>

        </s:complexType>

      </s:element>

      <s:element name="Company_AddResponse">

        <s:complexType>

          <s:sequence>

            <s:element minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="1" name="Company_AddResult" type="s:int"/>

            <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="txtErrorMessage" type="s:string"/>

          </s:sequence>

        </s:complexType>

      </s:element>

    </s:schema>

  </wsdl:types>

  <wsdl:message name="Company_AddSoapIn">

    <wsdl:part name="parameters" element="tns:Company_Add"/>

  </wsdl:message>

  <wsdl:message name="Company_AddSoapOut">

    <wsdl:part name="parameters" element="tns:Company_AddResponse"/>

  </wsdl:message>

  <wsdl:portType name="AdminSoap">

    <wsdl:operation name="Company_Add">

      <wsdl:input message="tns:Company_AddSoapIn"/>

      <wsdl:output message="tns:Company_AddSoapOut"/>

    </wsdl:operation>

  </wsdl:portType>

  <wsdl:binding name="AdminSoap" type="tns:AdminSoap">

    <soap:binding transport="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http"/>

    <wsdl:operation name="Company_Add">

      <soap:operation soapAction="http://tempuri.org/Company_Add" style="document"/>

      <wsdl:input>

        <soap:body use="literal"/>

      </wsdl:input>

      <wsdl:output>

        <soap:body use="literal"/>

      </wsdl:output>

    </wsdl:operation>

  </wsdl:binding>

  <wsdl:service name="Admin">

    <wsdl:port name="AdminSoap" binding="tns:AdminSoap">

      <soap:address location="http://their.service.com/admin.asmx"/>

    </wsdl:port>

  </wsdl:service>

</wsdl:definitions>

When I first tried to call this web service method my code looked something like the following:

<cfinvoke webservice="http://their.service.com/admin.asmx?wsdl" method="Company_Add" returnvariable="result">

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyName" value="ACME Inc" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyAddress1" value="123 Main Street" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyAddress2" value="Suite 100" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyZip" value="12345" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyFax" value="1234567890" />

</cfinvoke>

This resulted in the "Web service operation ... with parameters ... could not be found" error I described yesterday. Looking at the WSDL it looked like Company_Add possibly needed to be a structure, so I also tried:

<cfset myCompany = StructNew() />

<cfset myCompany.txtCompanyName = "ACME Inc" />

<cfset myCompany.txtCompanyAddress1 = "123 Main Street" />

<cfset myCompany.txtCompanyAddress2 = "Suite 100" />

<cfset myCompany.txtCompanyZip= "12345" />

<cfset myCompany.txtCompanyFax= "1234567890" />



<cfinvoke webservice="http://their.service.com/admin.asmx?wsdl" method="Company_Add" returnvariable="result">

    <cfinvokeargument name="Company_Add" value="myCompany" />

</cfinvoke>

This didn't work either. I tried several other variants as well, all with similar results.

Today however, after reading the above article, I decided to run the WSDL through the WSDL2Java tool to see what I could figure out. After running the utility I took a look at the generated web service interface and this is what I found. (I broke this into multiple lines for easier reading.)

public void company_Add (

    java.lang.String txtCompanyName,

    java.lang.String txtCompanyAddress1,

    java.lang.String txtCompanyAddress2,

    java.lang.String txtCompanyZip,

    java.lang.String txtCompanyFax,

    javax.xml.rpc.holders.IntHolder company_AddResult,

    javax.xml.rpc.holders.StringHolder txtErrorMessage

) throws java.rmi.RemoteException;

As you can see, the company_Add method expected to be passed the company_AddResult and txtErrorMessage. Also the method returns void, so I removed the returnvariable attribute from my <cfinvoke> tag and tried the following call:

<cfinvoke webservice="http://their.service.com/admin.asmx?wsdl" method="Company_Add">

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyName" value="ACME Inc" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyAddress1" value="123 Main Street" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyAddress2" value="Suite 100" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyZip" value="12345" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyFax" value="1234567890" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="company_AddResult" value=""/>

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtErrorMessage" value="" />

</cfinvoke>

I was getting closer, no more "Web service operation ... could not be found" error, but now I had a "String index out of range: 0" error being caused by the blank value for txtErrorMessage. The problem I facing was how to get data back from a web service method which returned void. After a little more trial and error I finally came up with the following, which worked:

<cfset company_AddResult = CreateObject("java","javax.xml.rpc.holders.IntHolder").init() />

<cfset txtErrorMessage = CreateObject("java","javax.xml.rpc.holders.StringHolder").init() />



<cfinvoke webservice="http://their.service.com/admin.asmx?wsdl" method="Company_Add">

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyName" value="ACME Inc" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyAddress1" value="123 Main Street" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyAddress2" value="Suite 100" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyZip" value="12345" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtCompanyFax" value="1234567890" />

    <cfinvokeargument name="company_AddResult" value="company_AddResult"/>

    <cfinvokeargument name="txtErrorMessage" value="txtErrorMessage" />

</cfinvoke>



<cfdump var="#company_AddResult#" />

<cfdump var="#txtErrorMessage#" />

The web service call was successful and the company_AddResult and txtErrorMessage variables held the webservice results after the call.

So if you find yourself struggling with a web service call that involves complex inputs or outputs definitely check out the above article and give the WSDL2Java utility a try. They certainly helped me figure this issue out.