Tracing XML request/responses with JAX-WS

Question

Is there an easy way (aka: not using a proxy) to get access to the raw request/response XML for a webservice published with JAX-WS reference implementation (the one included in JDK 1.5 and better) ? Being able to do that via code is what I need to do. Just having it logged to a file by clever logging configurations would be nice but enough.

I know that other more complex and complete frameworks exist that might do that, but I would like to keep it as simple as possible and axis, cxf, etc all add considerable overhead that I want to avoid.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Following options enable logging of all communication to the console (technically, you only need one of these, but that depends on the libraries you use, so setting all four is safer option). You can set it in the code like in example, or as command line parameter using -D or as environment variable as Upendra wrote.

System.setProperty("com.sun.xml.ws.transport.http.client.HttpTransportPipe.dump", "true");
System.setProperty("com.sun.xml.internal.ws.transport.http.client.HttpTransportPipe.dump", "true");
System.setProperty("com.sun.xml.ws.transport.http.HttpAdapter.dump", "true");
System.setProperty("com.sun.xml.internal.ws.transport.http.HttpAdapter.dump", "true");

See question Tracing XML request/responses with JAX-WS when error occurs for details.

Answer 2

I am posting a new answer, as I do not have enough reputation to comment on the one provided by Antonio (see: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1957777).

In case you want the SOAP message to be printed in a file (e.g. via Log4j), you may use:

OutputStream os = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
javax.xml.soap.SOAPMessage soapMsg = context.getMessage();
soapMsg.writeTo(os);
Logger LOG = Logger.getLogger(SOAPLoggingHandler.class); // Assuming SOAPLoggingHandler is the class name
LOG.info(os.toString());

Please note that under certain circumstances, the method call writeTo() may not behave as expected (see: https://community.oracle.com/thread/1123104?tstart=0 or https://www.java.net/node/691073), therefore the following code will do the trick:

javax.xml.soap.SOAPMessage soapMsg = context.getMessage();
com.sun.xml.ws.api.message.Message msg = new com.sun.xml.ws.message.saaj.SAAJMessage(soapMsg);
com.sun.xml.ws.api.message.Packet packet = new com.sun.xml.ws.api.message.Packet(msg);
Logger LOG = Logger.getLogger(SOAPLoggingHandler.class); // Assuming SOAPLoggingHandler is the class name
LOG.info(packet.toString());

Answer 3

You could try to put a ServletFilter in front of the webservice and inspect request and response going to / returned from the service.

Although you specifically did not ask for a proxy, sometimes I find tcptrace is enough to see what goes on on a connection. It's a simple tool, no install, it does show the data streams and can write to file too.