Designer 10.7 | webMethods Service Development Help | Building Map Services | What Is a Map Service?
 
What Is a Map Service?
A map service, like a flow service, is a service that is written in the webMethods flow language that allows you to adjust the contents and structure of a pipeline.
As with a MAP step, you can use a map service to:
*Prepare the pipeline for use by a subsequent step in the map service by linking, adding, and dropping variables in the pipeline.
*Clean up the pipeline after a preceding step by removing fields that the step added but are not needed by subsequent steps.
*Move variables or assign values to variables in the pipeline.
*Initialize the input values for a map service.
*Invoke several services (transformers) in a single step.
*Map documents from one format to another. For example, you can map a document in an XML format to an ebXML format or a proprietary format.
*Create a ForEach mapping between the array variables in the pipeline.
Unlike a MAP step, a map service exists as an independent element in the Integration Server namespace, allowing the map service logic to be reused by other flow services. For example, if you regularly need to map from one format to another, you might create a map service that contains all of the logic to transform the data. Services that need the same data transformation, can invoke this mapping service. Similarly, if you have a set of complex mapping that needs to be performed repeatedly, then instead of placing the complex mapping in a MAP step or a series of MAP steps, you can create a single map service. You can invoke this map service when the other services require the same complex mapping.