Flushing a cached web service

When you use WebServices with ColdFusion, the WSDL ‘stub’ is cached in CF Administrator (presumably for performance reasons).

This can be a pain when you need to change the WSDL and you don’t have access to CF Admin to flush the service which is the scenario I found myself in today.

Luckily for me I sit near some ColdFusion peeps who sorted me out with a little Java method (courtesy of the ServiceFactory) to flush a WSDL from a ColdFusion template.

Basically all you need to do is:

<cfset wsdl = "yourwsdlpath.wsdl">
<cfobject type="java" action="Create" name="factory" class="coldfusion.server.ServiceFactory">
<cfset RpcService = factory.XmlRpcService>
<cfset RpcService.refreshWebService(wsdl)>

I also wrapped it up in a little function:

<cffunction name="flushWebService" access="public" output="false" returnType="void" hint="Flush a cached WebService in ColdFusion Administrator">
	<cfargument name="wsdlURL" type="string" required="false" default="#getWSDLURL()#" hint="URL of the WSDL to flush" />
	
	<cfscript>
		
		var oFactory = createObject("java", "coldfusion.server.ServiceFactory");
		
		oFactory.XmlRpcService.refreshWebService(arguments.wsdlURL);
		return;
		
	</cfscript>
		
</cffunction>

Thanks Marko (and Mark)

After the fact I did some googling and found a great read from Doug Boude on Refreshing Cached ColdFusion Webservices Through the Back Door in case you’re interested.