Question

I need to deploy the same web service for each customer. This @javax.jws.WebService uses Object as method arguments and return types (resulting in <xs:anyType/> in wsdl). Each instance of web service is deployed along with customer’s jar on the classpath. This jar has known structure and contains JAXB-annotated classes which client wants to handle via my service.

The problem is that when customer passes an instance of his class as method agrument, server-side JAXB context unmarshals it into some strange xerces dom node because (as I understand it) during the deployment time only @WebMethod and @WebService annotations were scanned which, as was already said, are all dealing with Object only.

Simply speaking, I need to hint JAXB at WEB-INF/lib/customer_classes_14586.jar which means taking some control over JAXBContext creation during JAX-WS deployment.

Is it possible at all?

Server-specific solutions are fine (glassfish 3.1 with metro ws stack)

UPDATE

I’ve missed one thing that might be important: I deploy these web services as OSGI bundles at runtime via web admin console. When I press deploy button new jar is programmatically built up from customer library, webservice class, wsdl and manifests. So I could interfere in build process and provide hinting information at this point of time if this helps.

Answer 1

First option is @UsesJAXBContext annotation. More info here: Specify JAXB Packages in SLSB and JAX-WS

I haven’t tested it cause when I found this annotation I’ve been already halfway towards other solution which might be helpful for others.

The key is using @WebServiceProvider instead of @WebService, a bit low-level but simple:

@WebServiceProvider(
  wsdlLocation = "WEB-INF/wsdl/injector.wsdl"
)
@ServiceMode(value = Service.Mode.PAYLOAD)
public class InjectorService implements Provider<Source> {
  private Unmarshaller unmarshaller;

  @Override
  public Source invoke(Source request) {
    try {
      DOMResult requestDom = new DOMResult();
      Transformer trans = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
      trans.transform(request, requestDom);
      Node requestNode = requestDom.getNode();
      // Get the operation name node.
      Node operationNode = requestNode.getFirstChild();
      // Get the parameter node.
      Node parameterNode = operationNode.getFirstChild();
      // Unmarshal
      JAXBElement<Object> element = unmarshaller.unmarshal(parameterNode, Object.class);
      Object unmarshalled = element.getValue();          

      //  Handling customer object and response ......
    } catch (Exception e) {
      throw new RuntimeException("Endpoint error", e);
    }
  }

  protected Class[] getCustomerClasses() {
    // return customer classes somehow
  }

  @PostConstruct
  public void init() throws Exception {
    JAXBContext jbc = JAXBContext.newInstance(getCustomerClasses());
    unmarshaller = jbc.createUnmarshaller();
  }
}

That’s it. Customer classes can be obtained from classpath, bundle context or whatever.