Tutorial

Tutorial on creating a new service

For a web service to be able to send results back to Unicorn, it needs to implement a specific format called an observation response. Basically, this is an XML document listing all the messages (errors, warnings and information) that the web service produced.

The following code is a very basic response resource showing the different message types. Each message has a type (info, warn, error), a context (optional) and a title. Each message element can have more data, like a longer text, an associated group, ... As you can see, there's also a status which is used to express if the test succeeded or failed. For a detailed description of this format check out its dedicated documentation.

The complete XML schema for this format is [source:WebContent/WEB-INF/resources/schemas/observer-response.xsd].

A tutorial composed of several responses is available directly through the development version of Unicorn. It takes the form of results from Unicorn using the special test task along with a set of response files. This special task allows developers to test their Unicorn output by submitting a response file and seeing how Unicorn displays them.

TODO: talk a bit about the contract (WADL file)