Hopefully this is a simple enough request, for those of you who spend an inordinate amount of time developing applications that use SOAP.

My phone system (Cisco Communications Manager) exposes every last one of it's administrative tasks as a web service, which allows enterprising nut jobs like me to develop custom applications to ease administration. It's particularly helpful when you want to allow your help desk to perform what would otherwise be complex, error-prone tasks, but with a dumbed-down templated interface, without giving them the "keys to the kingdom", as it were. It's working great. I'm happier than a fat tick on a skinny dog.

The problem is, my development is rather tedious, because while the API is documented, it's a pain in the ass to navigate. Somebody at Cisco basically loaded up the WDSL and the XSD, ran them through some app that generated "documentation", and presented it as a MASSIVELY HUGE single html document, with thousands of png images. Great idea for a simple web service, but it's so large that it locks up Firefox for a good 3 minutes (even when the files are local) while it's loading. Once it's loaded, it's cumbersome to navigate.

Do any of you guys know of any decent free WSDL editors/viewers that will present the WSDL and XSD in a pleasant, well formed way? Preferably navigable? Applications like XMLSpy look fantastic, but they're mighty proud of that shit, and I've already tapped my boss out in the "Buy Subnet cool shit, because he asked nicely" account.

What I've got definitely beats reading the raw WSDL and XSD files (shudder), but it still sucks.

Tall order?

It must be, because either my google-fu is weak today, or very few people have this "problem". No love, just yet.

I am going to answer your question in a different way:   I know what you are looking for but don't know of any. However there is potentially a different way to skin the cat.

my company has a tool called workflow that allows you to connect to a web service with a generator, that generator queries the web service and builds a visual component for each function of the web service.  Then you use a visio-like visual workspace to drag and drop those web services into an automated process.  You can also do forms and stuff like that to present to users.

The only downside is that you need a server to host/run it.  Can be a VM or something,  but we have LOTS of people who do what you are doing, build some forms / front end UI to hide the complexity,  then present a form to end users that does maybe three things,  for example start a vm, stop a vm or reset a vm.  so users are mucking stuff up by seeing and having options for ever function in the service.

Not exactly what you're looking for, but another way to do what you're trying to do.

here's a quick video that shows how they generate new components against a web service.  I'll check with my dev team to see if they have tools that do more what you're looking to do, they're all SOAP/Web Service developers.

Generating a Workflow Component against a web service

Also assuming you have tried some XML readers and don't like how they are formatting the output. Many of them will read those.

I haven't found any free (or reasonably priced ones) that will nicely format a WSDL. None that I've found so far understand an XSD schema. Syntax highlighting is easy enough, but the idea is to prevent me from having to stare at a raw XML document.

Here's an example.

WSDL snippet:

<message  name="addAARGroupIn">

<part  name="parameters" element="xsd1:addAARGroup"></part>

</message>

XSD snippet:

<xsd:complexType name="XAARGroup">

<xsd:sequence minOccurs="0">

<xsd:element name="name" type="axlapi:String32"/>

<xsd:element name="relatedGroups" minOccurs="0">

<xsd:annotation>

<xsd:documentation>Read-only.  AXL API automatically adds the required entries in the AARDialPrefixMatrix table.</xsd:documentation>

</xsd:annotation>

<xsd:complexType>

<xsd:sequence>

<xsd:element name="relatedGroup" type="axlapi:XAARGroupRelationship" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>

</xsd:sequence>

</xsd:complexType>

</xsd:element>

</xsd:sequence>

<xsd:attribute name="uuid" type="axlapi:XUUID" use="optional"/>

</xsd:complexType>

<xsd:complexType name="XAARGroupRelationship">

<xsd:sequence minOccurs="0">

<xsd:choice>

<xsd:element name="AARGroup_From" type="axlapi:XAARGroup"/>

<xsd:element name="GroupNameFrom" type="axlapi:String100"/>

</xsd:choice>

<xsd:choice>

<xsd:element name="AARGroup_To" type="axlapi:XAARGroup"/>

<xsd:element name="GroupNameTo" type="axlapi:String100"/>

</xsd:choice>

<xsd:element name="prefixDigit" type="axlapi:String32"/>

</xsd:sequence>

<xsd:attribute name="uuid" type="axlapi:XUUID" use="optional"/>

</xsd:complexType>

This isn't designed for a human being to read.

An application that will parse the above, and generate something like this:



...would be awesome. Particularly if I can navigate it.

Are these WSDL-based services? Or is there some additional SOAP stuff going on in there?

This may seem a little weird, but....if you have VS.Net, maybe you can use the WSDL tool to create a more easily browsable object model. eg. WSDL ClassModel.cs Path/To/ComplexWsdlFile.wsdl

Yes. My SOAP (NuSoap, if you're curious) client interprets the WSDL, which keeps me from having to generate raw SOAP envelopes myself, and send them over sockets. Nice and easy.

My problem is more of a minor bitch - it's hard to navigate a 208kb wsdl, and it's accompanying 1MB xsd, to get an idea of what elements are required, which are optional, what attributes are valid, what the enumerated lists are, and so forth. It's HUGE.

Think of it as a documentation problem. Suppose you had 3,000 classes, each well commented. It's one thing to look at the source code yourself to get an idea of what methods, properties, etc are available, but wouldn't you like a tool to "document" these classes for you? There are tons available. Free, too.

But when it comes to doing the same thing for  WSDL and XSD files, the tools that do this are like $900 (and they do a lot more than what I'm after).

i'm sorry to say that what you need doesn't exist, AFAIK.

faced with that, i look to the detailed design documents and, particularly, the unit test cases for guidance.

why not point visual studio at the wsdl and let it make a reference class.  that way you can navigate the class rather than navigating the wsdl.

Altova XMLSpy will do it (and even generate kick ass documentation in various formats), but it's $500 bones.

Isn't there a 30-day demo of xmlspy? Did yours expire?

I just installed it, and had it generate some documentation. Worked like a champ.

I also (believe it or not) talked my boss into letting me buy it. He seems to be REALLY into this lately, which is kind of odd.

I just got our department to buy 3 licenses of Adobe Master Suite CS5 ...and SmartFTP