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Invoke ReSTful Web Services with BizTalk Server 2010

This article presents a workable solution for consuming ReSTful services using BizTalk Server 2010.

Acknowledgements

We in the BizTalk Server CCxG team gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the following individuals for providing their valuable inputs in setting up the end-to-end scenario used in this article:

Shailesh Agre, BizTalk Server PSS

Contents

What is ReST?

What is ReST?

ReST stands for Representational State Transfer and defines an architecture to create network applications, typically over the World Wide Web. In most cases, the protocol used for a ReST client-server communication is HTTP. An application that uses ReST architecture is called a ReSTful application. Such applications use HTTP requests to create, update, read, and delete data, thereby supporting all CRUD operations. These CRUD operations are performed by ReST by supporting the GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE methods.

The two fundamental aspects of a ReST design pattern are:

Let us understand this with an example. An organization "Contoso" has a significantly large customer base and wants to provide customers with the option to view their details as stored in Contoso's records. If Contoso decides to expose the customer details the ReSTful way, it would have to think on the lines of:

Each customer is resource.
Each customer can be identified by a unique URL.

Going by this theory, a URL that could probably provide details for a customer with ID = 9999 would look like:

http://www.contoso.com/Customer/Details/9999

Had there been no ReSTful way of retrieving customer details, one would have to send a SOAP request that would have probably looked like:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-envelope <wrap type="none"></wrap><anchorlock></anchorlock><wrap type="none"></wrap><anchorlock></anchorlock>http://www.contoso.com/customer <wrap type="none"></wrap><anchorlock></anchorlock>

In the case of ReST, the URL is sent over an HTTP GET request to the server and the response is received in the form of raw data. In the traditional SOAP-way of invoking Web services, the XML request message is sent over an HTTP POST request to the server, and the response is embedded as the payload within the SOAP response envelope.

ReST URLs can also include parameters to handle more complicated requests. For example, to get customer details for John Smith, the URL might look like:

http://www.contoso.com/Customer/Details?firstName=John&lastName=Smith

To know more about ReST, you might want to go through the following links:

RESTful Web Services (book) <wrap type="none"></wrap><anchorlock></anchorlock>
RESTful .NET (book) <wrap type="none"></wrap><anchorlock></anchorlock>
Steps Toward the Glory or REST <wrap type="none"></wrap><anchorlock></anchorlock>

One of the real-life examples of ReST is the

BizTalk Server and ReST

In the previous section we saw how ReST is not SOAP and that ReST supports GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE methods. So, if one has to use ReST with BizTalk Server, the adapter to be used should be able to:

Exchange

Support GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE methods.

If we look at the adapters available with BizTalk Server 2010, only the HTTP adapter satisfies the first criteria but it does not support GET (it does support the POST method). Similarly, the webHttpBinding (that supports consuming and exposing ReSTful services) available with WCF-Custom adapter can send non-SOAP messages but that too has no way of specifying the HTTP verb to be used. All other adapters either do not support HTTP verbs or always exchange SOAP messages. So, there is no way to have an out-of-box BizTalk configuration to consume a ReSTful service. To use BizTalk Server with ReST, we'll have to do some customizations around HTTP adapter or the webHttpBinding of the WCF-Custom adapter. There is no prescribed way of doing customizations around the HTTP adapter. However, to the webHttpBinding, we can add some custom behaviors that when coupled with webHttpBinding enable BizTalk users to invoke and consume ReSTful services. Through these customizations, we can specify the following: How to encode the request body and decode the response.

With WCF-Custom port configuration, there's no way of specifying these customizations directly on the webHttpBinding. So, we'll have to put these values in the request message. After specifying the values as part of the request message and adding a custom behavior to the webHttpBinding, when the request message hits the WCF-Custom port with the webHttpBinding, the custom behavior extracts the values from the request message and frames the required HTTP transport.

Now let us talk a little bit about the customization that would be required on the webHttpBinding. webHttpBinding is WCF-based. WCF enables you to alter messages before they are sent or after they are received through

So, to sum it up, to consume a ReSTful service with BizTalk Server, this is what we need to do:

Scenario for this Article