WSDL2Java and document/literal

[to...@gsk.com]

Hi,

I have some WSDL that defines a service which takes no parameters but 
which has a complex response object. The response object defines a list of 
complex objects (which are not very complex in reality, with each object 
having a few attributes of strings and ints). The WSDL2Java tool generates 
all of the classes just fine, but there is nothing done to the incoming 
response, which comes back as a raw XML SOAP body element. There is no 
code that converts the response element to the list object that I want. 
All the generated stub does is try to cast the response element (actually 
a vector of soap body elements, with only one entry) to the class that was 
generated for the response message. Consequently, a class cast exception 
occurs.

Does anyone have any ideas what I might need to do, to get this to work, 
other than write some XML parsing code?

Just to clarify ...

The response from the service call is a vector of RPCElement instances (an 
Axis class). There is only one element in the vector, as expected. The 
single element, an RPCElement, is the XML of the expected response. The 
XML defines a list of other elements, each of which has a few simple 
attributes. The relevant generated stub code looks something like this:

        java.lang.Object _resp = _call.invoke(new java.lang.Object[] 
{myServiceCall});

        if (_resp instanceof java.rmi.RemoteException) {
            throw (java.rmi.RemoteException)_resp;
        }
        else {
            extractAttachments(_call);
            try {
                return (myResponseClass) _resp;
            } catch (java.lang.Exception _exception) {
                return (myResponseClass) 
org.apache.axis.utils.JavaUtils.convert(_resp, myResponseClass);
            }
        }

The _resp object is the vector of RPCElements. The myReponseClass is the 
class generated from my WSDL response message definition. The cast is 
always bound to fail, and the JavaUtils.convert call is only designed to 
convert between collections (which my response message class isn't). I 
feel sure that I'm not doing something I need to, since  can't see how 
this could ever work for anyone.

I tried the generator that comes with Sun's JWSDK and this seems to work 
OK, though I haven't delved into the innards yet, so don't know what the 
differences are.

Cheers,
Tony

Re: WSDL2Java and document/literal

[to...@gsk.com]

Don't worry; I think I've figured this out.

I had assumed that an object needed to be passed to the method in the 
generated stub. The actual web service implementation doesn't need a 
parameter but the generated stub method takes an object. I'm new to this 
but managed to find some reference to a Soap body element and decided to 
create one of these to pass in. This worked, so far as the web service 
call is concerned. However, it caused Axis to use messaging, rather than 
RPC. This, in turn, resulted in a response object that was a vector of 
SOAP body elements, which wasn't what was expected.

When I simply passed a null to the generated stub method it all worked 
wonderfully, since the object returned from the service call invoke method 
was the Java object I expected all along. I don't yet understand the 
detail of all this but it now works fine. I'm not sure why Sun's JWSDK 
handled this OK and Axis didn't but I'll leave that for another day.

Cheers,
Tony