Question

(Following up on this question: Getting raw XML response from Java web service client)

I’ve got a SOAP message handler that is able to get the raw XML of a web service response. I need to get this XML into the webservice client so I can perform some XSL transformations on the response before sending it on its way. I’m having trouble figuring out a good way to get data from a SOAP handler that catches incoming messages, and makes the raw XML available to a generated (from a WSDL) web service client. Any ideas if this is even feasible?

---

I’ve come up with something like this:

public class CustomSOAPHandler implements javax.xml.ws.handler.soap.SOAPHandler<javax.xml.ws.handler.soap.SOAPMessageContext>
{
    private String myXML;
    public String getMyXML()
    {
        return myXML;
    }
    ...
    public boolean handleMessage(SOAPMessageContext context)
    {
        ...
        myXML = this.getRawXML(context.getMessage());
    }

    //elsewhere in the application:
    ...
    myService.doSomething(someRequest);
    for (Handler h: ((BindingProvider)myService).getBinding().getHandlerChain())
    {
        if (h instanceof CustomSOAPHandler )
        {
            System.out.println("HandlerResult: "+ ((CustomSOAPHandler )h).getMyXML());
        }
    }

In very simple tests, this seems to work. But this solution feels somewhat like a cheap hack. I don’t like setting the raw XML as a member of the chain handler, and I have a gut feeling this violates many other best practices. Does anyone have a more elegant way of doing this?

Answer 1

The solution was to use JAXB to convert the objects back to XML. I didn’t really want to do this because it seems redundant to have the webservice client receive XML, convert it to a POJO, only to have that POJO converted back to XML, but it works.