Web Service Interoperability Testing

The Background

When creating web service today, Web Service Interoperability is getting to be a bigger and bigger issue. There are a number of choices for the server platform, but the it is definately best if the client platform is not restricted in any way. We want everybody to be able to use our web service.

WS-I is an organization working towards Web Service Interoperability "across platforms, operating systems, and programming languages". They have created some profiles that define a number of rules, that should ensure that your web service is interoperable. Ensuring that your web service complies to all these rules would, of course, be a monumental task, so there are ways to automate the actual testing, and that is what I am going to talk about today.

Getting Started

First you need to download the WS-I's Testing Tools which can be found on this page. Since I am talking about Web Service Interoperability in the context of .NET you should get the C# version of the testing tools.

Extract the zip file in the directory where you have your web WSDL file or files of your web service. It should be extracted to a subdirectory called wsi-test-tools.

Configuration

Now we need to create a configuration file for the testing tools, here is an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
 <configuration xmlns="http://www.ws-i.org/testing/2003/03/analyzerConfig/"
  xmlns:wsi-common="http://www.ws-i.org/testing/2003/03/common/"
  xmlns:uddi="urn://uddi-org/api_v2/">
  <description>This file contains the WS-I testing
   configuration for WebService.</description>
  <verbose>true</verbose>
  <assertionResults type="all" messageEntry="true" assertionDescription="true"
   failureMessage="true" failureDetail="true"/>
  <reportFile replace="true" location="..\..\..\REPORT_WebService.xml">
   <addStyleSheet href="wsi-test-tools\common\xsl\report.xsl" type="text/xsl" alternate="false"/>
  </reportFile>
 <testAssertionsFile>..\..\common\Profiles\BasicProfileTestAssertions.xml</testAssertionsFile>
 <wsdlReference>
  <wsdlElement type="binding" namespace="http://tanis.dk/2004/10/29/services.wsdl"></wsdlElement>
  <wsdlURI>..\..\..\..\WebService.wsdl</wsdlURI>
  <serviceLocation>http://tanis.dk/blog</serviceLocation>
 </wsdlReference>
</configuration>

We also need a batch file to run the tests. It could look like this:

@echo off
cd wsi-test-tools\cs\bin
Analyzer.exe -config ..\..\..\WebServiceConfig.xml
cd ..\..\..

Running the tests

And now we are ready to run our tests:

The output

After we have run the tests we have a nice viewable report that holds all the different test details, and what went wrong, if some of them failed.

If everything goes well, this is what you should be seeing:

If there are any problems with the wsdl, it will show you so:

The report contains a summary over all the different tests as defined, and it shows which ones passed or failed:

Further down in the report you can read a detailed description of each test. If they failed you will get an explanation why it failed:

Conclusion

Ensuring Web Service Interoperability is not an easy task. There are lots of things to be aware of, but if you align yourself with a few good tools, it might just become easier.

Just my two cents.