Calling Web Services in BizTalk Server

BizTalk Server provides built-in support for Web services. You can consume web services from within an orchestration. You can aggregate several web services into single orchestration to complete an entire business process.

Usually, when you consume a Web Service, the Add Web Reference wizard will create a set of message types for you in the Orchestration View. If the types of the web methods are simple, then you can not choose them for the mapper. Instead you will need to use a Message Assignment shape and assign values to the parameters manually instead of using a map.

In some special cases, a web service returns or accepts an object. In such cases a custom map is required to send a request to the web service. When you look under the folder “Web References”, you will find a file named Reference.xsd. This file would contain the expected input and output formats to correctly invoke the web service.

There is a demo at the following URL.

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/WSCustomParams.asp

Calling a Web Service with Custom Parameters from an Orchestration in BizTalk Server 2004

By Naveen Karamchetti.

In BizTalk Server 2006, you can also call web services directly without orchestration.

You can create a send port capable of sending messages to the external web service. Simply choose the SOAP adapter and specify the address of the external Web service. Then, on the Web Service tab, select a Web service proxy class and method to use. BizTalk will use this proxy class when sending the message. The assembly needs to be in the global assembly cache (GAC) at run time.

For more information, please refer to the following URL.