Extracting and Parsing data with soapUI

Question

Hi. So I am in need to learn how to use soapUI pretty quick. I'm finding it pretty tedious to start so I was hoping I might be able to get some help here. Here's what I need to do.

Lets say we have Company A and Company B which is a subset of Company B. Now Company A offers a webservice accessible by Company B such that Company B can gather daily aggregated data from Company A's database. Now Company B wants to take this data and publish it on their website.

What I'd like is a very basic overview of what I need to do to extract and parse the data onto a website. Just the outline of the process so I can get started.

What languages should I be using at what stages and what not.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

This isn't a SoapUI question, rather, you need to get started with SOA/SOAP. That's fine, and SoapUI is a good way to figure it out. The SOAP webservice published by company A will have "methods" that allow access to data, or let you add/update data. Suppose they're a used car registry. They may have methods such as GetCarList, GetCarData, SubmitBid, etc.. You call those via SOAP, and get a response. Both the request and response are XML.
CompanyA will publish a "wsdl" that describes the interface. Plug that into SoapUI, and you should be able to make sample requests. There will probably be empty fields, with ? in them, which are placeholders for data (carID, VIN, MaxRecords, etc..). See if you can modify the request enough to satisfy the server, press the GO button, and see what you get back. If you're lucky, you'll get data back, and you're on your way.

When you get down to building your app, you can pretty much use the language of your choice. .Net, PHP, Java, native C, even Delphi... The SOAP is designed to be platform/language agnostic. If you can talk via HTTP/HTTPS, you should be in business.