[java] How to do a SOAP Web Service call from Java class?

I'm relative new to the webservices world and my research seems to have confused me more than enlighten me, my problem is that I was given a library(jar) which I have to extend with some webservice functionality.

This library will be shared to other developers, and among the classes in the jar will be classes that have a method which calls a webservice (that essentially sets an attribute of the class, does some business logic, like storing the object in a db, etc and sends back the object with those modifications). I want to make the call to this service as simple as possible, hopefully as simple so that the developer using the class only need to do.

Car c = new Car("Blue");
c.webmethod();

I have been studying JAX-WS to use on the server but seems to me that I don't need to create a wsimport in the server nor the wsimport on the client, since I know that both have the classes, I just need some interaction between classes shared in both the server and the client. How do you think makes sense to do the webservice and the call in the class?

Or just use Apache CXF's wsdl2java to generate objects you can use.

It is included in the binary package you can download from their website. You can simply run a command like this:

$ ./wsdl2java -p com.mynamespace.for.the.api.objects -autoNameResolution http://www.someurl.com/DefaultWebService?wsdl

It uses the wsdl to generate objects, which you can use like this (object names are also grabbed from the wsdl, so yours will be different a little):

DefaultWebService defaultWebService = new DefaultWebService();
String res = defaultWebService.getDefaultWebServiceHttpSoap11Endpoint().login("webservice","dadsadasdasd");
System.out.println(res);

There is even a Maven plug-in which generates the sources: https://cxf.apache.org/docs/maven-cxf-codegen-plugin-wsdl-to-java.html

Note: If you generate sources using CXF and IDEA, you might want to look at this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/46812593/840315

I found a much simpler alternative way to generating soap message. Given a Person Object:

import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonInclude;

@JsonInclude(JsonInclude.Include.NON_NULL)
public class Person {
  private String name;
  private int age;
  private String address; //setter and getters below
}

Below is a simple Soap Message Generator:

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.DeserializationFeature;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.SerializationFeature;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype.jsr310.JavaTimeModule;
import lombok.extern.slf4j.Slf4j;
import org.apache.commons.lang3.StringUtils;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat.xml.XmlMapper;

@Slf4j
public class SoapGenerator {

  protected static final ObjectMapper XML_MAPPER = new XmlMapper()
      .enable(DeserializationFeature.READ_UNKNOWN_ENUM_VALUES_AS_NULL)
      .configure(DeserializationFeature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES, false)
      .configure(SerializationFeature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS, false)
      .registerModule(new JavaTimeModule());

  private static final String SOAP_BODY_OPEN = "<soap:Body>";
  private static final String SOAP_BODY_CLOSE = "</soap:Body>";
  private static final String SOAP_ENVELOPE_OPEN = "<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap=\"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/\">";
  private static final String SOAP_ENVELOPE_CLOSE = "</soap:Envelope>";

  public static String soapWrap(String xml) {
    return SOAP_ENVELOPE_OPEN + SOAP_BODY_OPEN + xml + SOAP_BODY_CLOSE + SOAP_ENVELOPE_CLOSE;
  }

  public static String soapUnwrap(String xml) {
    return StringUtils.substringBetween(xml, SOAP_BODY_OPEN, SOAP_BODY_CLOSE);
  }
}

You can use by:

 public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{
        Person p = new Person();
        p.setName("Test");
        p.setAge(12);

        String xml = SoapGenerator.soapWrap(XML_MAPPER.writeValueAsString(p));
        log.info("Generated String");
        log.info(xml);
      }