Where to place version information in a wsdl?

Question

I have a web service where the definitions are located in the wsdl-file and the schema in an external xsd-file.

In the xsd file, there is the schema tag, which provides an attribute 'version' that I can use to document the current version. Is there something similar in the wsdl format (WSDL 1.1)? If not, what is the best place to store a general version attribute for documentation purposes?

Please keep in mind that I do not want to achieve backward compatibility, like it is described in http://blogs.iona.com/sos/20070410-WSDL-Versioning-Best-Practise.pdf. I just want to document the version in the wsdl.

Answer 1

I'm not aware of a dedicated WSDL construct for specifying the version. Instead you could use the documentation element for this, maybe in a structured form like this:

<wsdl:service name="MyService1" ...>
  <wsdl:documentation>
    A service for ...

    Author: John Doe

    Version: 1.2

    History: 1.2 2011-07-07 Added operation foo()
             1.1 2011-15-04 Added optional attribute bar
             1.0 2011-10-02 Initial release

  </wsdl:documentation>
  ...
</wsdl:service>