How does an application interact with CollabNet TeamForge SOAP services?

SOAP APIs

CollabNet TeamForge exposes a subset of the APIs defined by the application server as web services, through the SOAP protocol. A SOAP proxy server and a SOAP API layer, both running on Apache Axis, expose a set of web services representing each CollabNet TeamForge application.

The SOAP server provides the following functions:

• Provides web services by accepting SOAP requests from the clients.
• Performs SOAP client authentication.
• Implements CollabNet TeamForge role‐based access control (RBAC) and caching services.
• Accesses the application server via RMI stubs.

While each CollabNet TeamForge service has its own SOAP interface, interaction with each service is designed to be as consistent as possible. The calls for each service are similar, although the data format and specific call parameters may be different.

For example, the following calls are consistent across all services:

• list
• get
• set
• delete
• create

The call parameters, however, are different. For example:

• When working with the CollabNet service, you might call getProjectList(string sessionID).
• When working with the TaskApp service, you might call getTaskList(string sessionID, string taskFolderID).

User-centric services

All services and APIs are user‐centric, meaning that all integrated applications must establish an individual connection to the SOAP server for each user. This differs from programming directly with an application server where one connection can be established for any number of users.

Activities that can be performed using the SOAP interface are by definition user‐based, such as retrieving a list of a userʹs projects, tasks, or assigned tracker artifacts. These activities therefore require an individual connection for each user.

Requiring individual connections also ensures that role‐based access control is checked for each action performed by each user. To ensure that security is enforced, RBAC checks are performed on each SOAP API call and cannot be disabled at the client level.

Java

A set of Java wrapper classes for CollabNet TeamForge SOAP services is included in the SDK download for the convenience of Java programmers.

These libraries are necessary for Java‐based SOAP clients to compile and run correctly. All libraries listed here must be included within the CLASSPATH. All libraries are available in the CollabNet TeamForge SDK.

• Axis 1.4
  • axis.jar
  • commons‐discovery.jar
  • commons‐logging.jar
  • jaxrpc.jar
  • log4j‐1.2.8.jar
  • saaj.jar
• Java Mail APIs
  • mail.jar
• Java Activation Framework
  • activation.jar
• CollabNet TeamForge SDK
  • ce_soap50_sdk.jar

.NET

For developers programming using Microsoft®.NET, the CollabNet TeamForge SDK provides a 'convenience" library. The convenience library consists of a façade for performing CollabNet TeamForge back‐end operations from the.NET framework layer.

This façade allows developers to use common.NET constructs when programming CollabNet TeamForge, which otherwise would need to be done manually when interacting directly with the SOAP layer.

All of the.NET SDK material is available at ctf.open.collab.net.

Perl

For Perl programmers, an SDK is available at ctf.open.collab.net.

WSDL

For programming in other languages, such as Python, several WSDL tools are available to assist in generating local proxy objects.

WSDL is an XML document used to describe and locate web services, and provides a simple interface to SOAP. A WSDL file for a service fully describes the service APIs and data structures, and is used by various tools to automatically generate convenient language specific wrapper classes or functions.

Axis and Apache SOAP provide tools to generate stubs if no WSDL tool is available. Programmers must read the WSDL definitions and manually construct all calls.

You can access the WSDL associated with any service using the following URL: http://<sourceforge‐server>/ce‐soap50/services/<service‐name>?wsdl

where:

• <sourceforge‐server> is the name of the server running TeamForge.
• <service‐name> is the name of the service (such as CollabNet, DocumentApp, TrackerApp, etc.)