Test your SOA web services using SOAP UI tool

The SOAP UI tool is a great tool that helps you to quickly test your web services. It is an easy to use tool that makes your SOA testing fun and easy.

I recently had the opportunity to use it on one of my SOA projects and it helped me a lot in debugging my web services. I had published some web services that I had developed in .NET 3.5 using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and this vendor company acted as the client consuming those web services. The vendor was developing his client on J2EE technology, possibly JSP/servlets web site.

During testing, the vendor told me that my web services were throwing exceptions containing messages that I had wrapped in a fault contract. The vendor’s development team just sent me the SOAP message that was causing my web service to throw an exception. Here is how I used the SOAP message as an input in the SOAP UI tool  to call my web service method:

Create SOAP UI Project:

Launch your soapUI tool. Right click on the Projects option in the left pane. Select the option of New soapUI Project.

Figure 1

Enter WSDL path:

The new soapUI project menu asks you to enter the name of the project and the WSDL path of your web service. Let’s assume that we will call one of my test web services of ProductsService and will call the web method of CreateProduct. I have published my WSDL at http://localhost:50911/ProductsService.svc?wsdl. I have specified this in Figure 2:

Figure 2

By selecting the check box for Create sample requests for all operations, the tool will automatically generate a sample request SOAP message. Click on OK. The tool generates a sample web request as shown in Figure 3:

Figure 3

Specify the SOAP message:

Double click on Request 1 and you will be able to see the sample request created. I will copy-paste the SOAP message on the Request 1 pane, sent to me from the vendor’s development team:

Figure 4

Note in figure 4 that I have highlighted the node in the SOAP message. The specifies the fully qualified namespace of my service contract of IProductsService’s web method of CreateProduct. The most important thing to note is . Here you will specify the URL path of the test web service where you have hosted. Since I need to debug the web service, I have launched it through Visual Studio.NET:  http://localhost:50911/ProductsService.svc

(I have also added xmlns:wsa="http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing" as an attribute of , because apparently soapUI tool does not add this by default).

Here is the SOAP request message:

<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope"

                   xmlns:web="http://WebServiceApp.ServiceContracts/"

               xmlns:wsa="http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing">

  <soap:Header>

    <wsa:Action>http://WebServiceApp.ServiceContracts/IProductsService/CreateProduct>

    <wsa:MessageID>urn:uuid:2161b61d-fe07-4cdb-a125-7b221100608awsa:MessageID>

    <wsa:ReplyTo>

      <wsa:Address>http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing/anonymous>

    wsa:ReplyTo>

    <wsa:To>http://localhost:50911/ProductsService.svc>

  soap:Header>

  <soap:Body>

    <web:CreateProduct>

      <web:productName>ABCweb:productName>

      <web:productDescription>XYZweb:productDescription>

      <web:productCode>5001web:productCode>

      <web:company>ABCXYZweb:company>

    web:CreateProduct>

  soap:Body>

soap:Envelope>

Call the web service:

Call the web service by pressing on the green play button. As you can see below the web service returns the following fault exception response wrapped in a fault contract:

<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope" xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing">

  <s:Header>

    <a:Action s:mustUnderstand="1">http://WebServiceApp.ServiceContracts/IProductsService/CreateProductDefaultFaultContractFault>

    <a:RelatesTo>urn:uuid:2161b61d-fe07-4cdb-a125-7b221100608aa:RelatesTo>

  s:Header>

  <s:Body>

    <s:Fault>

      <s:Code>

        <s:Value>s:Senders:Value>

      s:Code>

      <s:Reason>

        <s:Text xml:lang="en-US">Product code should be in the range of 1 to 500s:Text>

      s:Reason>

      <s:Detail>

        <DefaultFaultContract xmlns="http://WebServiceApp.FaultContracts/2008/02" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"/>

      s:Detail>

    s:Fault>

  s:Body>

s:Envelope>

The vendor has specified the wrong product code. The web service expects the product code to be in the range 1 to 500. After the correcting the SOAP request message I specify product code 400 and consequently get the following successful response message:

<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope" xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing">

  <s:Header>

    <a:Action s:mustUnderstand="1">http://WebServiceApp.ServiceContracts/IProductsService/CreateProductResponse>

    <a:RelatesTo>urn:uuid:2161b61d-fe07-4cdb-a125-7b221100608aa:RelatesTo>

  s:Header>

  <s:Body>

    <CreateProductResponse xmlns="http://WebServiceApp.ServiceContracts/">

      <CreateProductResult>25CreateProductResult>

    CreateProductResponse>

  s:Body>

s:Envelope>

Although this example is quite trivial but in case if you have large SOAP request messages having a lot of data fields, then the soapUI tool comes quite handy.