Exposing a SOAP service as JSON using IBM Integration Bus 10.

A common use case we get in IIB is the implementation of JSON to SOAP integration where you may have an existing service which is a webservice with SOAP/HTTP and you would like to expose it as JSON for the REST architecture style in the world of cloud and mobile.

If you look at the implementation domain where such a service may sit. IIB is a suitable candidate for such implementation as mostly all the SOAP service in your enterprise would be behind a Datapower or any other network appliance. You may not want to add additional logic of transforming protocol on the Datapower layer.

IIB 10 does provide valuable feature of directly converting a message flow to support REST, and you can even deploy the flow to the cloud. We would not be talking about the cloud side of it. Lets just talk about the basic implementation of JSON to SOAP using IIB 10.

I would be using a feature of IIB 10 here where you can define mapping without having a model/schema first, you can start your map and then later model the source and target messages.

Datapower database interaction

This is one topic which might pop up in your mind when you are trying to learn Datapower.How do I interact with the database using Datapower Appliance.?
The two most common methods to send and receive data from a database using a DataPower appliance are the SQL Action and XSL extensions.

The SQL Action

The SQL Action is added to a processing rule in the same way all other actions are specified:

sql-action.jpg

The SQL Action is found under the Advanced Action menu and is highlighted in the processing rule in Figure above. This action offers three ways to specify a query. The first is a static string directly defining the SQL or XQuery statement. Second is a query string held in a DataPower variable, likely created in preceding processing. The third is a query generated as the text output of a XSL transformation. Figure 4 shows the configuration of a SQL Action defined with a static SQL statement:

XSLT support

The ability to execute SQL queries in XSL stylesheets is available in the XI50 appliance through the dp:sql-execute() extension function. The 3.7.1 firmware release introduced the extension element, which extends the database-related capability of the appliance.