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SSIS Web Service Task: misleading role of WSDL file

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[2017-Mar-31] You can call one of your web service methods in SSIS package using a .NET script task or you can just use an existing Web Service task. The latter option is easier, UI based, doesn't take too much time to set up and Input/Output parameters are very intuitive to navigate.

There is one gotcha with the use of WSDL file though that is not fully documented but is worth to be mentioned. When you initially setup a Web Service task in SSIS, you need to provide a web server URL for your Http connection (let's just take this for example: http://www.webservicex.net/Statistics.asmx?WSDL), then you need to locate a local WSDL web service reference file with all available methods within. Then you test your ETL packages, it works well and all is merry and bright. However if you think that by changing the Http connection for your web service (let's say from Dev to Prod) you will be calling a Production version of your web service method then, actually it's not the case. It still going to be your Dev environment. I've learned this the hard way at my recent BI project, testing a web service call in UAT environment but for unknown reasons I was still getting results from the original Dev environment.

<wsdl:service name="Statistics">
<wsdl:port name="StatisticsSoap" binding="tns:StatisticsSoap">
<soap:address location="http://www.webservicex.net/Statistics.asmx"/>
</wsdl:port>
</wsdl:service>
Apparently an SSIS Web Service task uses WSDL file defined connection to your web server stored in the soap:address tag regardless of what your Http connection would specify your web server location is.

My way to resolve this problem was to create a separate WSDL file for my UAT environment web service and make it a part of SSIS environment configuration, i.e. each different environment Htpp web service connection would be coupled with a corresponding WSDL file in order to prevent data result confusion during SSIS control flow execution, and don't forget to make those two parameters configurable.

Please let me know how you had to resolve a similar issue with the use of SSIS Web Service task after you deploy your ETL package to a different environment.



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