Progress OpenEdge enables ABL clients to access SOAP web services as SOAP clients. ABL developers can use existing SOAP services seemlessly from within their applications.

What is SOAP?

SOAP is an acronym for Simple Object Access Protocol. SOAP enables applications built on different platforms or in different programming languages to exchange messages in a standard way, primarily over HTTP.

The SOAP specification, which describes the protocol, is based on XML. It defines the structure of SOAP messages and the rules for processing a SOAP message.

A typical SOAP transaction involves the following components:
  • A SOAP client application that initiates the transaction by sending a SOAP request message.
  • A SOAP web service that processes the SOAP request and returns a SOAP response message. If an error occurs while processing the request, the web service returns a SOAP fault message.
  • A Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document that describes the operations that are available on the SOAP web service and the request and response message schemas for each operation. SOAP client applications use the WSDL to determine which operations to invoke, generate request messages using the message schema in the WSDL, etc.
In this example, your ABL code is the SOAP client. To learn more about SOAP, see the following resources:

Steps to build an ABL SOAP Client

To build an ABL SOAP client you will need to complete the following steps.
  1. Run the WSDL Analyzer
  2. Examine the generated WDSL documentation
  3. Develop code from sample snippets