Passing XML data to SOAP service dilemma

Question

I had posted this question yesterday: How to go about creating SOAP webservice in Java and after following this book: http://www.packtpub.com/java-7-jax-ws-web-services/book I have managed to created a JAX-WS application:

package hellows;
import javax.jws.*;
@WebService(portName = "HelloWSPort", serviceName = "HelloWSService", targetNamespace = "http://hellows/", endpointInterface = "hellows.HelloWS")
public class HelloWSImpl implements HelloWS {
    public String hello(String name) {
        // replace with your impl here
         return "Hello "+name +" Welcome to Web Services!";

    }
}

All is fine. But what I need is that the service method(ie "hello") should instead of "string" accept an XML file describing student details(I've changed the original file):

<?STU version="1.0"?>
<stu>    
        <id sequence="1">2354282</id>
        <date>2012-06-17T21:19:15</date>
        <student interest="food" status="newadmission">
            <id></id>
            <birthyear>2012</birthyear>
            <sex>Male</sex>
            <address>Sonata</address>
            <class>3</class>
         </student>


</stu>

Then the service will process it and return a Java Object containing a flag "passed"/"failed" based on some algo.

So my question is:

• How should service method receive this XML data? As a String? or some other way?
• Will I need to describe this XML data format in .wsdl and .xsd files within the config folder?

Answer 1

I have done a similar thing using AXIS2. So, my answer might be able to give you some hope :)

In services.xml file: Configure your hello operation in such a way that its messageReceiver class is of type org.apache.axis2.receivers.RawXMLINOnlyMessageReceiver

<operation name="hello"> 
<messageReceiver class="org.apache.axis2.receivers.RawXMLINOnlyMessageReceiver"/> 
</operation>

Then, you can process the incoming XML element inside your hello method.

import org.apache.axiom.om.OMElement;
import org.apache.axiom.om.xpath.AXIOMXPath;
import org.jaxen.JaxenException;

public String hello(OMElement xmlElement) {
        try {
            AXIOMXPath someXPath = new AXIOMXPath("//root/child");
        String str = ((OMElement)someXPath.selectSingleNode(node)).getText();
        } catch (JaxenException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();  
        }
}