For a customer i needed to call a external REST webservice to update an external database with some specific information.

With the use of the utl_http package Oracle has made this very simple.

I tried to make the procedure i made, self-explaining.

create or replace procedure call_rest_webservice
as
  t_http_req     utl_http.req;
  t_http_resp    utl_http.resp;
  t_request_body varchar2(30000);
  t_respond      varchar2(30000);
  t_start_pos    integer := 1;
  t_output       varchar2(2000);

begin
  /*Construct the information you want to send to the webservice.
    Normally this would be in a xml structure. But for a REST-
	webservice this is not mandatory. The webservice i needed to
	call excepts plain test.*/
  t_request_body := 'the data you want to send to the webservice';

  /*Telling Oracle where the webservice can be found, what kind of request is made
    and the version of the HTTP*/
  t_http_req:= utl_http.begin_request( 'http://the_url_of_the_webservice'
                                     , 'POST'
                                     , 'HTTP/1.1');

  /*In my case the webservice used authentication with a username an password
    that was provided to me. You can skip this line if it's a public webservice.*/
  utl_http.set_authentication(t_http_req,'username','password');                                     

  /*Describe in the request-header what kind of data is send*/
  utl_http.set_header(t_http_req, 'Content-Type', 'text/xml charset=UTF-8');

  /*Describe in the request-header the lengt of the data*/
  utl_http.set_header(t_http_req, 'Content-Length', length(t_request_body));

  /*Put the data in de body of the request*/
  utl_http.write_text(t_http_req, t_request_body);

  /*make the actual request to the webservice en catch the responce in a 
    variable*/
  t_http_resp:= utl_http.get_response(t_http_req);

  /*Read the body of the response, so you can find out if the information was 
    received ok by the webservice.
    Go to the documentation of the webservice for what kind of responce you 
    should expect. In my case it was:
	<responce>
	  <status>ok</status>
	</responce>
  */
  utl_http.read_text(t_http_resp, t_respond);

  /*Some closing?1 Releasing some memory, i think....*/
  utl_http.end_response(t_http_resp);
end;