Question

I’m trying to consume a webservice from camel using the cxf component, like this:

<cxf:cxfEndpoint id="webservice"
                 address="http://webservice.url.com/webservice"
                 serviceClass="com.url.webservice.MyWebService"/>

<camel:camelContext>
    <camel:route>
        <camel:from uri="direct:a"/>
        <camel:inOnly uri="cxf:bean:webservice?defaultOperationName=sendMessage"/>
    </camel:route>
</camel:camelContext>

The sendMessage method has no response, hence the inOnly rather than to (although I have the same problem when I try to instead). The problem is that apparently camel still expects a response, and the route hangs while waiting for one. I suppose if I let it try long enough, it would eventually time out.

To be clear, I’m running a test method:

/* ... */

@Produce(uri = "direct:a")
protected ProducerTemplate directA;

@Test
public void sendMessage() throws Exception {
    directA.sendBody(new String[] {"client id", "message"});
    directB.sendBody(new String[] {"client id", "message 2"});
}

And I’m seeing the effect of the first call (that is, the message arrives at the server), but not the second, and the method doesn’t finish running (again, I’m assuming it’ll timeout at some point… if so, the timeout’s pretty long: I ran the test as I started writing this, and it’s still running).

Am I missing something? Is it a bug? Is it just bad practice to have webservice methods with no response?

By the way, when testing methods which have a response, it works fine.

Answer 1

I think Willem Jiang recently fixed some issue with one-way CXF in Camel recently. Maybe try Camel 2.6-SNAPSHOT from trunk.

I personally prefer two-way with web services, just returning some ACK back in case there is no data to return back. The client most often want some confirmation the server has received and acknowledged the data.