External SOAP web service api call without wsdl from vCO workflow

[automationapi]

Hi All,

is it possible to call SOAP web services without using WSDL and vCO SOAP plug-in ??

I want to consume third party SOAP webservices without using SOAP plug-in, any one know how to do this, please share with me.

Thanks in advance.

[tschoergez]

You can use the URL object in Javascript, to create a HTTP call directly. But that does not support things like https encryption or authentication.

You can also (ab-)use the REST Plugin, it does support SSL and different authentication methods, and provides an more powerful way to combine and create your own custom HTTP GET/POST requests.

With that you can point the REST Plugin to your webservice URL, no need for a WSDL then. You just will of course have some more effort, becouse you have to create all the headers and call syntax of the http requests manually.

Cheers,

Joerg

[Burke-]

There are a few other ways to "work around" using the SOAP plug-in:

• Local "command" - The "command" object could be used to execute curl locally to make the necessary SOAP calls. This article (How to run a Perl Script from a vCenter Orchestrator Workflow ) walks you through the steps necessary to execute a local command on a vCO Appliance
• Use the Guest Operations workflows to have another system call curl, or whatever other command line utility, to make the necessary SOAP calls (Use this package as a starting point if you decide to go this route: Guest script manager package)
• Use the PowerShell plug-in to have PowerShell execute the SOAP calls

In any case, you will have some parsing to deal with. Good luck!