wsdl-viewer

Tool to visualize web-service in an intuitive way.

Example HTML documentation for simple example service generated by vsdl-viewer.

You can see your WSDL rendered by wsdl-viewer using a form on http://tomi.vanek.sk.

WSDL has its constructive logic, but it is hard to read / understand the content by business professionals (mostly non-programmers). Here is a small tool to visualize the web-service in a more intuitive way and to generate human-readable documentation. I developed this transformation for WSDL interface analysis of a complex system.

How to use wsdl-viewer

1) Online generated documentation

A smart composite URL uses the W3C XSLT service to generate the documentation for your WSDL. URL is constructed from

service address http://services.w3.org/xslt
wsdl-viewer xslt address ?xslfile=http://tomi.vanek.sk/xml/wsdl-viewer.xsl
and the WSDL address &xmlfile=URL_OF_YOUR_WSDL

Example URL for the online transformation:

http://services.w3.org/xslt?xslfile=http://tomi.vanek.sk/xml/wsdl-viewer.xsl&xmlfile=http://www.dneonline.com/calculator.asmx?wsdl

2) Stylesheet link in WSDL

An elegant option is to add the userfriendly face directly into the WSDL. This way by opening the WSDL in a browser the transformation prepares on-fly the HTML view. This requires just this changes in WSDL: The WSDL is just an XML, so adding a processing instruction can suggest the browser to use on-fly the XSLT to convert the WSDL into a human-readable HTML page. Example of the instruction:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="wsdl-viewer.xsl"?>

<wsdl:definitions ...>
    <!-- ... Here is the service declaration ... -->
</wsdl:definitions>

Of course in this case the XSLT is placed in the same directory as the WSDL. You can define also an absolute URL (i.e. <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="http://tomi.vanek.sk/xml/wsdl-viewer.xsl"?>).

Some legacy web-browsers are not able by default automatically recognize the .wsdl file type (suffix). For the type recognition the WSDL file has to be renamed by adding the suffix .xml - i.e. myservice.wsdl.xml.

3) Command-line or batch execution of XSLT

A set of WSDL-s can be converted into web pages (HTML) from command line or in a batch process (i.e. an ANT script, that has native XSLT support).

Development

Version 3.1.xx has support for WSDL 2.0 and modularization for better development / maintenance.

The modular XSLT is in folder src, the build script in build folder uses the Apache Ant build tool to create single-file XSLT and a distribution ZIP file.

Credits

The transformation was inspired by an article of Uche Ogbuji: WSDL processing with XSLT.
The use of XSLT service from W3C is inspired by an idea in CapeScience.com.
The WSDL Viewer was included in the WSDL parser Apache Woden
Author's page about the vsdl-viewer tool: tomi.vanek.sk

codeblock-gmbh / wsdl-viewer