Sending Requests using SOAP Client

Creating BaseTest class

Since we use the Spring framework and Annotations for defining beans, we need to load them before doing anything. Here, we will use the TestNG annotation @BeforeSuite to load the beans using AnnotationConfigApplicationContext which reads all the Spring annotated classes like @Configuration, @Service, etc.

In our case, we have annotated the WebServiceClient class with @Configuration for the bean that needs to be loaded.

We will create BaseTest which will be extended by all the test classes so that we need not duplicate the @BeforeSuite method that contains loading of beans. This will be executed once per test suite and initializing the WebServiceTemplate in @BeforeClass will be executed for every test class that is extending BaseTest. We will mark BaseTest as abstract to disallow the explicit initialization of the class.

It also has the SERVICE_URL that holds the location where the web service is hosted.

import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.AnnotationConfigApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.ws.client.core.WebServiceTemplate;
import org.testng.annotations.BeforeClass;
import org.testng.annotations.BeforeSuite;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat.xml.XmlMapper;

public abstract class BaseTest {

	protected static ApplicationContext CONTEXT;

	protected WebServiceTemplate webServiceTemplate;

	protected static final String SERVICE_URL = "http://ezifyautomationlabs.com:6566/educative-soap/ws";

	protected static final Logger LOG = LoggerFactory.getLogger(BaseTest.class);

	@BeforeSuite
	public void init() {
		if (CONTEXT == null) {
			CONTEXT = new AnnotationConfigApplicationContext(io.educative.soap.WebServiceClient.class);
		}
	}

	@BeforeClass
	public void initTemplate() {
		webServiceTemplate = CONTEXT.getBean(WebServiceTemplate.class);
	}

	protected void printResponse(Object response) {
		try {
			LOG.info("printing response '{}' => \n{}", response.getClass().getName(),
					new XmlMapper().writerWithDefaultPrettyPrinter().writeValueAsString(response));
		} catch (Exception e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	}
}

To learn more about TestNG annotations, please follow this link.

Creating TestClass

Here, we are creating a test class to test the GetStudents API. All the initialization code is already contained in BaseTest and marked with TestNG configuration annotations. Now, we have the required things to make the web service call.

To make the web service call, we need to know the service URL (where the web service is hosted), the request format (or class), and the response format (or class). All these information can be found in students.wsdl.

After building the test project, all the request and response formats (or classes) mentioned in students.wsdl will be generated and available for us to use.