Question

I have a bunch of generated SOAP client stubs that differ between WSDL versions. This happens because SOAP servers have different version of their web services.

Stubs for the web service version 1 are packed in soap.stubs.version1 and stubs for version 2 under soap.stubs.version2.

This means that MyStub in version 1 of the WSDL can be different from MyStub in version 2. As such if I call a SOAP method that returns version 2 of MyStub and hold the value in version 1 of MyStub It will “break”, as the xml response can’t be properly mapped to the stub’s attributes.

Because of this I need to associate class types with SOAP Servers.

Replicating logic for each version would be simply impossible:

if(SoapServer.version==1)
{
   soap.subts.version1.MyStub result = SoapServer.getFoo();
   /* rest of the logic using result of type soap.subts.version1.MyStub */ 
}
else if(SoapServer.version==2)
{
   soap.subts.version2.MyStub result = SoapServer.getFoo();
   /* rest of the logic using result of type soap.subts.version2.MyStub */
}

Every time I’d generate stubs for a newer version I would need to replicate all the logic to use the new stubs. Sometimes the only thing that changes is an attribute.

As such how can I use the proper stubs depending on the SOAP Server without having to re-implement all the logic for that “class”?

I thought about using Object but that would require allot of if instanceof and casts.

Answer 1

I’ve managed to resolve this issue with a misck of Java reflection and URLClassLoader. What I basicly did was:

• Depending on the Server version I define the package name from where to fetch the subts
• Using URLClassLoader I load the correct .class files
• Using reflection I invoke the correct methods

This has the great advantage of Plug And Play SOAP Servers even with different stub versions. The only thing that must be constant between versions are the methods names so it’s possible to fetch them through Class.getMethod.