External Web Services

External web services are data processing services provided over the Internet by a third party. You can define external web services in Spectrum Management Console and use them as a stage in a dataflow. This allows you to incorporate almost any kind of processing into your Spectrum Technology Platform environment, since there are a wide variety of web services available on the Internet.

The following diagram illustrates the concept of external web services. Here, an external web service named Phone Number Lookup has been added to the dataflow. When the dataflow runs, Spectrum Technology Platform sends each record to the external web service. The external web service processes the record and returns to the stage. The updated record, with the phone number added, continues to the next stage in the dataflow, in this example Geocode US Address.

External web services show up in the palette in Spectrum Enterprise Designer and you can work with them as you do other stages. The following shows an example of two external web services, CompanyReviewsWebService and TimeZoneLookupWebService.

Requirements and Limitations

Spectrum Technology Platform supports external web services that use REST, SOAP 1.1, or SOAP 1.2 messaging, with the following limitations:

• WADL requests and responses with more than one representation are not supported.
• Recursive schemas are not supported.