Consuming a service in Oracle Service Bus 12C using the REST adapter

In a previous post I have shown how to create a REST service in 12C. That was easy. But how do we consume a REST service? In this next bit I will show how to do that. The REST service we are going to use is Google’s Geocoding API. You can use this API to input address data and retrieve geo data in both JSON or XML. For example:

To consume this service in 11G we had to do quite some work….see here. Lets see if it has become more easy now in 12C.

First we are going to create the service how we are going to expose our service. We have the XSD and WSDL from the previous project so we are just going to reuse that. Create a new ServiceBus project GeoService and drag a new Pipeline onto your canvas. Name your pipeline GeoServicePipeline and click next. Next define its interface by selecting the WSDL using the icon with the green arrow. As you can see my WSDL is located in a folder called wsdl. Also check the box below ‘Expose as a Proxy Service’ and click Finish.

As you can see we have now a simple proxy service doing nothing.

We now have to hook it up to the Google backend. As seen in the previous post, a WADL is a description of how to use a REST service, comparable to a WSDL for SOAP services. So basically I am looking for a WADL for the Geocode API. After some looking around I found a SoapUI project containing a few Google API services with their created WADL’s in there. So basically I grabbed the WADL from there and I did some tweaking and tuning as I saw that when creating the REST adapter in JDeveloper, it was picky with some settings. The WADL I created looks as followed:

with matching XSD:

Stick these 2 files in a folder thirdparty under you project. Now open your composite and drag the REST Adapter component to the External Service swimlane.

Input the name and then click the green + at the bottom and select ‘Add operations based on WADL service’. Now select the WADL in the thirdparty folder and click OK. As you can see, the resource path and operation bindings are filled in. Also when you select the GET binding and click the pencil. You can see that both the request and response parameters are set.

Now click on OK and JDeveloper will generate a business service, a WADL and a WSDL for you. The WADL and WSDL are under Resources but the business service is in the root. To keep it clean I move the business service to the business folder. It might disappear from your swim lane but you can just drag it onto it again from your project.

Now lets hook at all together. Connect the Pipeline with the REST adapter and open the pipeline. Add a Replace action in the Request route pipeline with the following xpath.

Don’t forget the namespaces. Now also input a Replace action in the Response route pipeline with the following xpath.

In the Route set the Operation to GET.

Save the whole project and deploy it. Open your EM and lets see if the service works.

As you can see, the longitude and latitude are returned in the correct manner.

So, basically the conclusion is that the new 12C REST Adapter really makes your life easier when consuming a REST service. The only thing you might struggle with a bit is to get the WADL correct but once you get the hang if it, it is not too bad.