How to call a SOAP web service on Android [closed]

Question

I am having a lot of trouble finding good information on how to call a standard SOAP/WSDL web service with Android. All I've been able to find are either very convoluted documents and references to "kSoap2" and then some bit about parsing it all manually with SAX. OK, that's fine, but it's 2008, so I figured there should be some good library for calling standard web services.

The web service is just basically one created in NetBeans. I would like to have IDE support for generating the plumbing classes. I just need the easiest/most-elegant way to contact a WSDL based web service from an Android-based phone.

Answer 1

I had my tryst with KSOAP; I chose a rather simpler approach.

Given a WSDL file, create SOAP Request templates for each Request(for e.g.: using SOAP UI) and then substitute the values to be passed in code. POST this data to the service end point using DefaultHttpClient instance and get the response stream. Parse the Response Stream using an XML Pull parser.

Answer 2

SOAP is an ill-suited technology for use on Android (or mobile devices in general) because of the processing/parsing overhead that's required. A REST services is a lighter weight solution and that's what I would suggest. Android comes with a SAX parser, and it's fairly trivial to use. If you are absolutely required to handle/parse SOAP on a mobile device then I feel sorry for you, the best advice I can offer is just not to use SOAP.

Answer 3

Follow these steps by the method SOAP

From the WSDL file,

• create SOAP Request templates for each Request.

• Then substitute the values to be passed in code.

• POST this data to the service end point using DefaultHttpClient instance.

• Get the response stream and finally

• Parse the Response Stream using an XML Pull parser.

Answer 4

Please download and add SOAP library file with your project File Name : ksoap2-android-assembly-3.4.0-jar-with-dependencies

Clean the application and then start program

Here is the code for SOAP service call

    String SOAP_ACTION = "YOUR_ACTION_NAME";
    String METHOD_NAME = "YOUR_METHOD_NAME";
    String NAMESPACE = "YOUR_NAME_SPACE";
    String URL = "YOUR_URL";
    SoapPrimitive resultString = null;

    try {
        SoapObject Request = new SoapObject(NAMESPACE, METHOD_NAME);
        addPropertyForSOAP(Request);

        SoapSerializationEnvelope soapEnvelope = new SoapSerializationEnvelope(SoapEnvelope.VER11);
        soapEnvelope.dotNet = true;
        soapEnvelope.setOutputSoapObject(Request);

        HttpTransportSE transport = new HttpTransportSE(URL);

        transport.call(SOAP_ACTION, soapEnvelope);
        resultString = (SoapPrimitive) soapEnvelope.getResponse();

        Log.i("SOAP Result", "Result Celsius: " + resultString);
    } catch (Exception ex) {
        Log.e("SOAP Result", "Error: " + ex.getMessage());
    }
    if(resultString != null) {
        return resultString.toString();
    }
    else{
        return "error";
    }

The results may be JSONObject or JSONArray Or String

For your better reference, https://trinitytuts.com/load-data-from-soap-web-service-in-android-application/

Thanks.

Answer 5

I hope Calling a web service from Android helps.

Answer 6

Android does not provide any sort of SOAP library. You can either write your own, or use something like kSOAP 2. As you note, others have been able to compile and use kSOAP2 in their own projects, but I haven't had to.

Google has shown, to date, little interest in adding a SOAP library to Android. My suspicion for this is that they'd rather support the current trends in Web Services toward REST-based services, and using JSON as a data encapsulation format. Or, using XMPP for messaging. But that is just conjecture.

XML-based web services are a slightly non-trivial task on Android at this time. Not knowing NetBeans, I can't speak to the tools available there, but I agree that a better library should be available. It is possible that the XmlPullParser will save you from using SAX, but I don't know much about that.