Zip stream Web Services communication using SOAP Adapter

[VijayKonam]

Usually, in an organization, the service clients and the service providers are located in the same lan and are connected via high speed internal network connection. But sometimes, it could be that, the client applications are far from the service provider and the latency between the service calls could become a bottle neck.

To overcome this situation, in a typical browser and server communication, the web servers usually support zip stream communication, where the client announces to the server that it could accept a zip stream rather than the plain text html. The server then happily sends a zipped/compressed stream of response to the client. The client then locally unzips the stream ans displays it to the user. Both the server and clients are happy :smile: . Is the same possible for web service? :???:

The same is possible between web service clients and servers since the SOAP protocol is based on HTTP as well. SAP PI provides a built in, ready to use solution for achieving this. There are few magical parameters that could be added to the SOAP communication channels (both sender and receiver) which do this for us out of the box. These parameters are hidden deep in the documentation and could only be found when you are actually looking for them.

They are -

Parameter	Values	Ussage
XMBWS.XMLEncoding	iso-8859-1 etc	Add the Content-Type HTTP header to the call.
XMBWS.TransferEncoding	base64	Adds Content-Transfer-Encoding header along with encoding the payload.
XMBWS.Encoding	gzip	Adds Content-Encoding header along with encoding
XMBWS.AcceptEncoding	compress, gzip	Adds Accept-Encoding header to the call, so that the server knows that it can take zip stream

The above parameters when used in a sender SOAP adapter, makes the SOAP adapter to decompress the content. In sync scenarios, the response is encoded.

In a SOAP receiver adapter, the web service call is zipped and sent to the service provider.

You can use TCPGATEWAY for checking the actual HTTP data that is being exchanged between the client/server to confirm if the data stream is getting compressed for sure.

VJ