About Universal Names for Services or Document Types

Hybrid Integration 10.1 | Integrating On-Premises Applications | Document Conventions | Building Services | About Universal Names for Services or Document Types

Implicit and Explicit Universal Names

Assigning, Editing, or Viewing an Explicit Universal Name

Deleting an Explicit Universal Name

The Universal Name Registry

Every service and document type on a webMethods Integration Server has a universal name in addition to its regular webMethods name. A universal name is a unique public identifier that external protocols (such as SOAP) use to reference a service or document type on an Integration Server.

The structure of a universal name is the same as the structure of a QName in an XML namespace and consists of two parts: a namespace name and a local name.

The namespace name is a qualifier that distinguishes a webMethods service from other resources on the Internet. For example, there might be many resources with the name AcctInfo. A namespace name distinguishes one AcctInfo resource from another by specifying the name of the collection to which it belongs, similar to the way in which a state or province name serves to distinguish cities with the same name (for example, Springfield, Illinois, versus Springfield, Ontario).

Like namespaces in XML, the namespace portion of a universal name is expressed as a URI. This notation assures uniqueness, because URIs are based on globally unique domain names.

The namespace portion of the universal name can consist of any combination of characters that form a valid absolute URI (relative URIs are not supported). For example, the following are all valid namespace names:

http://www.gsx.com

http://www.gsx.com/gl/journals

http://www.ugmed.ch/résumè

For a complete description of what makes up a valid URI, see RFC 2396 Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax.

The local name uniquely identifies a service or document type within the collection encompassed by a particular namespace. Many webMethods users use a service’s unqualified name as its local name. Under this scheme, a service named gl.journals:closeGL would have a local name of closeGL.

Local names follow the same construction rules as NCNames in XML. Basically, a local name can be composed of any combination of letters, digits, or the following symbols:

.	(period)
-	(dash)
_	(underscore)

Additionally, the local name must begin with a letter or an underscore. The following are examples of valid local names:

addCustOrder

authorize_Level1

générent

For specific rules relating to NCNames, see “NCName” definition in the Namespaces in XML specification.