I am using axis2 to expose a method of existing class as a web service (bottom-up approach). The method takes a complex object (non-primitive type) as a parameter and returns a complex object as well.
I understand that axis2 will try to generate the schema for me in the wsdl file when I expose the method as a web service, and I can get the wsdl file by visiting the web service url and append ?wsdl into the end of it.
But upon closer examination, some of the attributes of the complex type in the parameters are represented as xs:anyType in the schema part of the resulting wsdl. The attributes that are converted into xs:anyType is a List. The bad thing with this is that when I generate the stub code for the client code, the method signature to set that particular attributes will take in an object as a parameter i.e. setAttribute(Object obj).
So my solution to this is to use JAXB 2.0 to generate the xml schema of the classes I need and then, import the xsd into the wsdl file that is generated by axis2 (downloaded from the web service url + ?wsdl) and use the edited wsdl instead of the one automatically generated. This solution seems to be working well for the client side. The method signature to set the attributes generated by the stub code will take in the proper type i.e. setAttribute(AnotherComplexType abcd). And by using tcpmon, I can see that the xml that is sent from the client to the server seems to be correct.
However, this approach does not work well for the server side because axis2 does not use the JAXB 2.0 annotation to convert the xml received back into the classes that the exposed method will be able to process.
My question is, is there anyway to solve my problem? The possible ways I can think of is either to modify the way axis2 process the xml after receiving it (I’m okay with processing it manually if there is indeed a way), or to make axis2 work well with JAXB 2.0 annotation? Or maybe any other idea?
Note: I’m not using the JAX-WS part of axis2
In the end I solved this myself. I generated the stub code for server side using the wsdl, modify the messageReceivers to use the generated message receiver instead, write a wrapper class that implements the generated interface, write a converter to convert the object from generated types in the parameter of the wrapper class methods going to be exposed to my internal types and expose the wrapper class instead.