Testing your Web services using the Data Web Services Test Client - Page 3

Testing a Web service using the Data Web Services Test Client without IBM Data Studio

One of the main benefits of the Data Web Services Test Client is that it can be launched and used to test your Web services independently of the IBM Data Studio IDE.

To launch the Data Web Services Test Client from a Web browser without a local copy of IBM Data Studio installed, enter the URL of your application server and the Web service of the form: http://server:port/context_root.

The server keyword is the hostname (or IP address) of the application server. In this series, since I’ve assumed you’ve installed IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition on your local machine, you can just use localhost to represent the IP address or hostname of your server.

The port keyword is the port number that the application server is listening on for incoming requests. We defined this when we configured the target application server in the Servers tab in Part 11 “Transforming Business Logic into a Web Services”.

If you don’t remember this port number, in the Servers tab, select that target application server, right-click, and select Open, as shown below:

The Server Overview window opens:

The HTTP Port field in the Port Configuration section shows the port that this application server is listening on; the default port number that IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (Application Server/CE) listens on is port 8080.

In the Security section, you can see the default user ID and password for the target installation for Application Server/CE. Use this user account information to log into Application Server/CE and manage the application server itself using the built-in link to the application server’s management console. To launch this console, select the application server, right-click, and select Launch Community Edition Console:

The context_root keyword is a string that represents the data development project name, the name of the Web services project, and the name of the Data Web Services Test Client Web page. In this series, the name of the data development project is DatabaseJournalProjectSOA, the name of the Web service built is SOA_FEMALEPERSONNEL, and the Data Web Services Test Client application resides in the TestClient folder and is called testClient.html. Therefore, to launch the Data Web Services Test Client directly from any Web browser, in our example, you would enter the following URL: http://localhost:8080/DatabaseJournalProjectSOA_FEMALEPERSONNEL/TestClient/testClient.html as shown below:

At this point, just follow the steps outlined in this article to test the Web service; after all, it’s the same rich testing application that you used within IBM Data Studio.

Wrapping it all up

In this article, I showed you a richer testing interface provided by the IBM Data Web Services component called the Data Web Services Test Client. This client provides a richer and more user-friendly environment for testing your Web services. As I showed you, the Data Web Services Test Client can be launched from within IBM Data Studio or externally from a Web browser, with no installation of IBM Data Studio required. In the next article, we’re going to create a more complex Web service to introduce you to the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) capabilities of IBM Data Studio; I will show you how to transform the XML output from the Web services tested thus far into a format used for a target application.

» See All Articles by Columnist Paul C. Zikopoulos

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Copyright International Business Machines Corporation, 2008.

Disclaimers

The opinions, solutions, and advice in this article are from the author’s experiences and are not intended to represent official communication from IBM or an endorsement of any products listed within. Neither the author nor IBM is liable for any of the contents in this article. The accuracy of the information in this article is based on the author’s knowledge at the time of writing.