Overview of WSDL 2.0 Document Structure

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∟Overview of WSDL 2.0 Document Structure

This section describes the high level structure of a WSDL 2.0 document, an XML document with 'description' as the root element, and 'types', 'interface', 'binding' and 'service' as top level elements.

As we learned earlier, WSDL 2.0 uses 6 layers of components to define a Web service: Types, Operation, Interface, Binding, Endpoint and Service.

These 6 layers of WSDL 2.0 components are written in an XML document following these rules:

"description" is the root element.
"types" is top level element served as a container representing the Types component.
"interface" is top level element served as a definition representing an Interface component, which contains a group of Operation components.
"binding" is top level element served as a definition representing the Binding component.
"service" is top level element served as a definition representing the Service component, which contains a group of Endpoint components.

The structure of a WSDL 2.0 XML document can be illustrated as:

<description ...>
  <types>
    ...
  </types>

  <interface ...>
    <operation ...>
      <input>
        ...
      </input>
      <output>
        ...
      </output>
      ...
    </operation>
  </interface>

  <binding ...>
    <operation .../>
  </binding>

  <service ...>
    <port .../>
    ...
  </service>

</description>