To publish web services for consumption by remote applications, you create the web service using ColdFusion components. For more information on components, see Building and Using ColdFusion Components.

Creating components for web services

ColdFusion components (CFCs) encapsulate application functionality and provide a standard interface for client access to that functionality. A component typically contains one or more functions defined by the cffunction tag.

For example, the following component contains a single function:

<cfcomponent>
    <cffunction name="echoString" returnType="string" output="no">
        <cfargument name="input" type="string">
        <cfreturn #arguments.input#>
    </cffunction>
</cfcomponent>

The function, named echoString, echoes back any string passed to it. To publish the function as a web service, you must modify the function definition to add the access attribute and specify remote, as the following example shows:

<cffunction name="echoString" returnType="string" output="no" access="remote">

By defining the function as remote, ColdFusion includes the function in the WSDL file. Only those functions marked as remote are accessible as a web service.

The following list defines the requirements for how to create web services for publication:

1. The value of the access attribute of the cffunction tag must be remote.
2. The cffunction tag must include the returnType attribute to specify a return type.
3. The output attribute of the cffunction tag must be set to No because ColdFusion converts all output to XML to return it to the consumer.
4. The attribute setting required="false" for the cfargument tag is ignored. ColdFusion considers all parameters as required.