Can we Publish a process model as a synchronous webservice ?

Hi Soujanya B (soujanyab0001)  As per my understanding, you can publish a process model as web service, and when you make a call to the service, generally that will be a asynchronous call and hence end-user gets the processId as the response.

However, if you want to invoke a service synchronously then there is a shared-component available, you would like to have a look into, this helps you to invoke a service synchronously as per your requirement, hence you can expect your pv's to be returned as the response.

 

Coming to your second question, is this an Appian Best Practice? I would say, unless there is any OOTB way available to achieve a requirement, you should go for OOTB way, you should only prefer Shared-Component when the requirement is very critical and there are no ways to achieve the same in Appian OOTB. And also you should keep in mind that, the plugin must be cloud approved, else you will face an issue while deploying or developing your application into cloud server. Also you need to think about, the various Appian supported versions for this plugin.

 

Hope this will help you..

Thanks for your response Alok.
Using this plug-in , do we get any other synchronous wsdl other than standard wsdl(which we get when publishing a processmodel as service) ? Which url do we need to provide any external systems to invoke this webservice ?

When you use this plug-in, the url will be different than we generally we used to have after exposing a process as service.

In fact, the plug-in is having a pretty good explanation, step by step, if you follow that, hope that will work for you.

The only thing is, whether this plug-in will be supported in Appian Latest versions or, that i am not sure, but i believe, this must support, because i believe, there is nothing changed in aspect of Exposing a Process as service, from version 7.x till 17.x, so basically this should work for Appian 16.x and 17.x as well.

Thanks! Will go through the plug-in info.

But may i know, why don't you go for Web-API instead of using WSDL/SOAP approach? I know, i am asking this in different context, but that can also serve your requirement, in fact with the better performance.

You can trigger the same process using Web-API POST Call, and can enable the Activity Chaining from the Start till the End-Node to expect the response from the process.

I believe that will be the best approach to serve your requirement using OOTB feature of Appian, and you don't need to depend upon any plug-in

Hi Alok,

I don't think web api's fpr the HTTP GET method will not execute smart services.
My requirement is to make the webservice with all the HTTP methods and moreover , based on the soap action which I had set , source system who is consuming this service is going to call .

Thanks
Soujanya