Category: Web Development

Trying to generate classes from a SOAP WSDL is pretty easy, especially if you are using Ant. You simply run the axis-wsdl2java task and you get the stub classes. The problem is that if your WSDL file looks like this:


<wsdl :definitions
targetNamespace="http://localhost/axis/services/MyService">
</wsdl>
<schema targetNamespace="http://myservice.yzukerman.cscie162.harvard">


The classes will be generated into two directories:

• The Axis infrastructure classes will be generated into:
  
localhost/axis/services/MyService


  Which corresponds to the WSDL URL

• The service stubs will be generated into:
  harvard/cscie162/yzukerman/myservice

  which is in the reverse order of the namespace URL

To overcome that, Axis can use a namespace mapping file, nsmap.properties which maps the namespace names into the package names you want each of the remote namespaces (Axis classes, stub classes) to be generated into. So, for the above files to both be mapped under a package called com.enavigo.myservice, the nsmap will look like this:

http\://myservice.yzukerman.cscie162.harvard=
com.enavigo.myservice

http\://localhost/axis/services/MyService=com.enavigo.myservice


My co-worker Nate Pickett helped me with this ‘discovery’.

Look at this JavaWorld article to more.

If you use Java 1.5 and try to use Axis 1.1’s WSDL2Java utility to read a WSDL file and generate Java stubs, you will notice that when the utility generates Enumeration objects which it names enum. Enum is a keyword in Java 1.5 (whoopie!) – so your code will not compile. This sucks.

Update: April 19, 2005
To make the compilation work, use the -source 1.4 switch. In the Ant javac task, add the source attribute and set it to 1.4.