Question

I am a SOAP newb assigned to resurrecting an old soap interface. I’ve ported the soap service onto a new tomcat at a new path (and left the client unchanged). I send the request:
http://myserver:8181/soap/SoapTest?wsdl
and I get back:

  <wsdl:definitions xmlns:ns1="http://webservices.mycompany.com"
    xmlns:ns3="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/http"
    xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/"
    xmlns:tns="http://www.mycompany.com/SoapTest"
    xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/"
    xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
    name="SoapTestService" 
    targetNamespace="http://www.mycompany.com/SoapTest">

    <wsdl:import location="http://myserver:8181/soap/SoapTest?wsdl=SoapTest.wsdl"
          namespace="http://webservices.mycompany.com"></wsdl:import>
    <wsdl:binding name="SoapTestServiceSoapBinding" type="ns1:SoapTest">...</wsdl:binding>
    <wsdl:service name="SoapTestService">...</wsdl:service>
  </wsdl:definitions>

Seems promising. A request to the import location SoapTest?wsdl=SoapTest.wsdl returns:

<wsdl:definitions xmlns:ns1="http://webservices.mycompany.com"
  xmlns:ns2="http://jaxb.dev.java.net/array" xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/"
  xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" 
  name="SoapTest"
  targetNamespace="http://webservices.mycompany.com">
  <wsdl:types>
    <xs:schema xmlns:tns="http://webservices.mycompany.com"
      xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
      targetNamespace="http://webservices.mycompany.com" version="1.0">
    <xs:complexType name="sessionObj">
      <xs:sequence>
        <xs:element name="code" type="xs:int"/>
        <xs:element name="id" type="xs:long"/>
        <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="role" type="xs:string"/>
        <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="username" type="xs:string"/>
      </xs:sequence>
    </xs:complexType>
    ... (and so on)

So the client can receive member xs name:type associations but seems not to be – or not to be applying them. That is …

HUH.. upon review, I see xs being used as a namespace but xmlns:xsd defined?? How might this happen?

ZSI client queries (from Windows, if that makes any difference) to this interface (Linux) receive responses containing the expected data payload but then map each data item into an individual “property” – resulting in a list of generic properties.

I was expecting a list of typed members, with each property cast to its xs type (e.g. int, long, string, string for the above), right?

Thanks in advance for any clues.

Answer 1

From ZSI documentation:

If the operation invoked returns a ComplexType, typecode information must be provided in order to tell ZSI how to deserialize the response.

In order for ZSI to transparently deserialize the returned complex type into a Person instance, a module defining the class and its typecode must be appended to the ZSI.Path list. It is also possible to explicitly tell ZSI what class and typecode to use by passing the class as a parameter to the Binding.Receive() method. The first method is often preferred, particularly for publically-distributed libraries.

Code Generation from WSDL and XML Schema is the second way ZSI provides to access WSDL services. Given the path to a WSDL service, two files are generated, a ‘service’ file and a ‘types’ file, that one can then use to access the service.