wsimport, generated code, and hardcoded URLs

[Tony Ennis]

My wsimport ant task is generating the following code in my MyAppService.java file:

  (snip)
  baseUrl = com.mycompany.myapp.webservice.generated.MyApp.class.getResource(".");
  url = new URL(baseUrl, "http://localhost:8080/ssws/myapp?wsdl");
  (snip)

This is correct and works fine on my machine. However, the URL isn't suitable for distribution. Unless I get smarter I'll have to distribute different versions of my client for testing, development, QA, and production. Ideally I'd just specify the appropriate URL in a properties file and distribute one zip file.

Obviously, I don't want to modify the generated source code. Is there a way to run wsimport so it doesn't hardcode the URL?

[Tony Ennis]

Bah, a self-bonk for me. I tried googling for the words I used in the subject for this message and found I can put the following in my client code:

     // This is my normal stuff
     MyAppService service = new MyAppService();
     MyApp port = service.getMyAppPort();

     // The following has the goodness
     ((BindingProvider)port).getRequestContext().put(BindingProvider.ENDPOINT_ADDRESS_PROPERTY,
                                                    "http://new/endpointaddress");

I am not 100% sure this will carry the day, but it looks promising. I'll report back as part of my penance for posting without searching

[Tony Ennis]

After some agony unrelated to the task at hand, the above approach worked. I replaced the "http://new/endpointaddress" bit with something out of a properties file.

[Tony Ennis]

Today I discovered the code above wasn't working correctly - it's true that it uses a web service on the configured endpoint but it gets the wsdl from the server used when the classes were generated! In my case, it was getting the wsdl from localhost. Fortunately for me I had my Tomcat down and my code phailed.

The problem is that "new MyAppService();" is reading the wsdl immediately. To get around this, I pushed the endpoint reference into the constructor:

        String endPoint = applicationProperties.getProperty(WEB_SERVICE_URL);
        if (endPoint != null) {
            log.info("Endpoint '" + endPoint + "' has been read from applications.properties");
            service = new MyService(new URL(endPoint + "?wsdl"), new QName("http://service.webservice.mything.mydomain.com/", "MyService"));
        } else {
            log.info("The default web service endpoint is being used because " + WEB_SERVICE_URL + " is not defined in application.properties");
            service = new MyService();
        }

I stole the QName constructor straight from the generated code. That's what it will use if no arguments are given.

The 'BindingProvider' code I referred to previously isn't needed. This suits me as I didn't like it.

[Paul Lusk]

Tony, Just a quick post to says thanks for posting all the steps you went through to get your web service ready for distrobution.
I ve been having a similar problem in so far as that I have a web service that runs fine on server as localhost , but not able to connect from LAN client.
Will take me a day or two to decipher exactly what your code is doing as I am new to web service coding, but It does look to be what I might need. Thanks. PL

[Tony Ennis]

Yer welcome.

Assuming you're using generated code, the trick is to look at the other constructors that are available to you.

MyService() has no arguments. It invokes another constructor using a default URL and QName. That URL is the one you specify in the ant task that generates the classes. I use the two-argument constructor supplying the desired URL for this argument. The default QName had nothing to do with the URL, so I lifted it as-is.

This needs to be tested more but it works and reports the right URLs...