Difference between a SOAP message and a WSDL?

Question

A SOAP document is sent per request. Say we were a book store, and had a remote server we queried to learn the current price of a particular book. Say we needed to pass the Book’s title, number of pages and ISBN number to the server.

Whenever we wanted to know the price, we’d send a unique SOAP message. It’d look something like this;

<SOAP-ENV:Envelope
  xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
  SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/">
  <SOAP-ENV:Body>
    <m:GetBookPrice xmlns:m="http://namespaces.my-example-book-info.com">
      <ISBN>978-0451524935</ISBN>
      <Title>1984</Title>
      <NumPages>328</NumPages>
    </m:GetBookPrice>
  </SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

And we expect to get a SOAP response message back like;

<SOAP-ENV:Envelope
  xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
  SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/">
  <SOAP-ENV:Body>
    <m:GetBookPriceResponse xmlns:m="http://namespaces.my-example-book-info.com">
      <CurrentPrice>8.99</CurrentPrice>
      <Currency>USD</Currency>
    </m:GetBookPriceResponse>
  </SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

The WSDL then describes how to handle/process this message when a server receives it. In our case, it describes what types the Title, NumPages & ISBN would be, whether we should expect a response from the GetBookPrice message and what that response should look like.

The types would look like this;

<wsdl:types>

  <!-- all type declarations are in a chunk of xsd -->
  <xsd:schema targetNamespace="http://namespaces.my-example-book-info.com"
    xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema">

    <xsd:element name="GetBookPrice">
      <xsd:complexType>
        <xsd:sequence>
          <xsd:element name="ISBN" type="string"/>
          <xsd:element name="Title" type="string"/>
          <xsd:element name="NumPages" type="integer"/>
        </xsd:sequence>
      </xsd:complexType>
    </xsd:element>

    <xsd:element name="GetBookPriceResponse">
      <xsd:complexType>
        <xsd:sequence>
          <xsd:element name="CurrentPrice" type="decimal" />
          <xsd:element name="Currency" type="string" />
        </xsd:sequence>
      </xsd:complexType>
    </xsd:element>

  </xsd:schema>
</wsdl:types>

But the WSDL also contains more information, about which functions link together to make operations, and what operations are avaliable in the service, and whereabouts on a network you can access the service/operations.

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