A service interaction represents a specific invocation of a service operation. A service may contain multiple operations. Each operation has a schema in the service that defines the operation inputs and outputs. Before a service operation can be used in a business process, you must specify the operation by extracting the schema that defines that operation. You must have the operation defined to determine how the schema will be used in the business process. If you have more than one operation in a service, you must manually create service interactions for all except the first operation from a service.
Service interactions are created one of three ways:
Service interaction files are created automatically when you use the New Service Wizard.
A service interaction file is automatically created when a new Web service or a service that is discovered as the result of a search is brought into the Navigator.
A service interaction to serve as a placeholder can be created as a placeholder for a service if you are not ready to define a service but want to make note of where the service would be used in the business process or as a service interaction when a service contains more than one operation to be used in a business process. After the service operation is defined, you can edit the Service Interaction to specify an operation. See Editing Service Interactions.
When you define a service for a messaging or database service, two files with the same name are automatically created in the Navigator:
A WSDL file with a .wsdl extension. A WSDL file contains the information. To view the file contents double-click on the .wsdl file.
and
A Service Interaction file with an .face extension. The .iface file is a service interaction file that serves as an interface for editing your service interaction during design time.
All work with that instance of the service is done using the service interaction file (.iface extension).
You can create an empty service interaction to serve as a placeholder if you are not ready to define a service but want to make note of where it would be used within the business process. Empty service interactions also allow you to use multiple schema (operations) from the same WSDL file.
If you make changes to the WSDL file after you have copied the WSDL to the Service Library, the two service interactions are no longer connected.
For detailed information about service interactions, see Creating a Service Interaction.