SOA 10.1.3.1 Hints - Episode 2

Following up on my Series SOA 10.1.3.1 Hints today I'll shed some light on the new and improved HTTP binding.

As you know, we always offered a way to start a process instance not just via SOAP or the Java API - but also through some kind of REST like binding.

With the 10.1.3.1 release we switched XML parsing to Oracle's XDK and also added some new features to make this again properly working.

1) HTTP post can also have a form posted and not just plain xml (REST) - for this to work you need to specify the following in the header of the http request
content="application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=iso-8859-1"

2) A namespace and message part can be specified in the request by using
<input type="hidden" name="msg_part" value="payload">
<input type="hidden" name="namespace" value="http://services.otn.com">
where msg_part maps to the part of the input message type (usually payload) and namespace to the target namespace of the element (as defined in the wsdl).

On a side note, the whole http get works only for not nested elements, in case of complex (=nested) types you have to use POST with fully qualified xml.