# Overview: Service Broker Control

The Service Broker control allows a business process to send requests to and receive callbacks from another business process, a Web service, or a remote Web service or business process. The Service Broker control is an extension of the Web Service control.

A remote Web service or business process is accessed using Web services and is described in a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file. A WSDL file describes the methods and callbacks that a Web service implements, including method names, parameters, and return types. You can generate a WSDL file for any business process by right clicking on a JPD file in the Application pane and choosing Generate WSDL File. To learn more about WSDL files, see WSDL Files: Web Service Descriptions.

The first step in using a Service Broker control is creating a JCX file. The JCX can be automatically generated from a target service (Web service, business process, or WSDL file) using WebLogic Workshop, or can be created using the Add function in the Controls section of the WebLogic Workshop Data palette. The methods and callbacks on the JCX correspond to operations and callbacks of the target service. An instance of this JCX is used by a parent service to call the target service and can also be used to get callbacks from the target service. Service Broker control JCX files can only have selector annotations on start methods for stateful target services, whereas they can have selector annotations on any method for stateless target services.

Note: The parent process and the target process must both be configured to use the same protocol. Protocol matching and enabling is not handled automatically.

To learn about creating a Service Broker control, see Creating a New Service Broker Control. For more information on Service Broker Control methods, see ServiceBrokerControl Interface.