Understanding Service Contexts and Configurations

In the context of M3 Web Services, a configuration is a representation of a single environment, for instance an M3 backend system.

A service configuration can be understood in two different scenarios:

• Design-time configuration: This is the configuration defining the back-end system from which the metadata is retrieved in order to create the web service.

• Run-time configuration: This is the configuration defining the back-end system to use when executing web services.

A service context is used when deploying web services, and can be viewed as a name space for your services. Services deployed to a service context will have the service context name as a segment in the endpoint.