In a SOA application there will be many services that are dependent on each other. Naturally one would develop a service, deploy it to a server and in a next service refer to that deployed service. That means that in the new project a reference is created based on a concrete WSDL that resides on a remote server. Often the WSDL and related XSD’s are copied to the referencing project. This causes several copies of basically the same XSD and WSDL throughout the whole SOA application system. Maintaining these xsd’s is a tedious job. At compilation of a project the server delivering the deployed service should be up and running. And at the end the deployment of the whole application to a new server (System Test, Acceptance Test, Production) is constrained in the order of deploying the different components of the application.

The solution in SOASuite 11g is to use the Meta Data Store (MDS). There are a few blog-entries on how to relate to XSD’s/WSDL’s in the MDS on the server and how to synchronize the XSD’s and WSDL’s. For a good starting point the following two blog entries are helpful:

• Clemens Utschig Utschig: Re-using common metadata (wsdl / xsd / edl) in SOA Suite 11g 
• Edwin Biemond: Soa Suite 11g MDS deploy and removal ANT scripts

However, these blog entries don’t provide an overall description on how to setup your project/application for using the MDS. Also these entries don’t show how to relate the application to a shared local “MDS” folder elsewhere besides in the Jdeveloper install folder. In a regular project you would place the artifacts in a subversion (SVN) server. So the references to the XSD’s and WSDL’s would be to a folder structure in the SVN working copy and that won’t (should not) reside in the Jdeveloper install folder.
That leaves me to tie the pieces together. So I created a demo application to work-out the details and wrote a whitepaper about it. You can download the whitepaper from our site.