What is this?

This is a total hack to generate classes from a 1.1 or 1.2 (NOT 2.0!) WSDL (using WSDL4J) for use with the Simple XML Serializer on Android.

This project does not itself run on Android. This is just a plain old java project. It generates java files that need to be put into an Android project’s source tree. That Android project needs to also have the Simple XML library available.

Why?

It seems everyone is using KSoap2 on Android…and frankly…I’m too lazy to write all the POJOs and methods to create envelopes and and and…

It was more interesting to create this generator than do that crap. Plus, if they change the WSDL on me, I can just rerun this thing and it’ll mostly work.

Plus, I don’t need a special library to do SOAP stuff on the Android – just Simple XML

I just looked at the code, OMFG! You suck! Ever heard of classes??

Yeah, yeah. This is an embarrassing hack to get my current, paying, project going. The only reason it’s up here on a public repo is so that I don’t have to host it and it doesn’t take one of my private slots :) Well, there’s a slight chance others could use it…

Can I use this?

Maybe. Honestly, I doubt this will work for anyone out of the box. It might, but I’ve only tested it on the one WSDL that I actually needed to use it on. It certainly makes some assumptions that may not apply to your WSDL.

Probably the best use you’ll get out of this is to use it as a starting point for your own hack. Or, if you’re awesome, you can pretty up this code and make it more generally useful, then submit a pull request. ;)

If your WSDL is from this decade, it’s probably 2.0. For some reason my client is using 1.2. So, that’s what this code expects. If you need 2.0, check out Woden. It does 2.0, but not 1.1/2. You should be able to use that to parse the WSDL, then traverse whatever it generates to populate my POJOs (see below).

I’m still reading…totally desperate here.

Alright. Well, the main class is SimpleSoap. It hacks its way through the DOM created by WSDL4J, collects information into some POJOs, then uses Velocity to render out java classes.

The POJOs are:

• ComplexType
  • which contains a list of Fields
• Message (these are SOAP operations)

SimpleSoap’s main() uses three parameters:

• The WSDL filename
• The package that will be the root of the gen’d classes if you put ‘my.soap’ you will get:
  • my.soap.WhateverSoapService (class that contains actual SOAP calls)
  • my.soap.type (package that contains all the complex type classes)
  • my.soap.message (package that contains all the SOAP envelope classes)
• The output directory – this should match your package name otherwise the project you’re genning for will be upset at you.

After running this thing, one of the output classes is a service. The service class will have the name of the WSDL service name (it’s one of the tags in there). In that class there will be a method for each operation that you can use like:

new AsyncTask<INPUT, Boolean, OUTPUT>() {
									
    @Override
    protected OUTPUT doInBackground(QuotePrice... params) {
	return MyService.MyOperation(new MyOperationInputTyep(params[0]));										
    }
									
    protected void onPostExecute(OUTPUT result) {
	progBar.setVisibility(View.GONE);
	if(null != result) {
	    //Do stuff with the result
	} else {
	    Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), "Something is wrong!", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
	}
    }
									
}.execute(INPUT); 

I chose to just do all the logging and exception handling in the generated service call instead of replicating that all over. One downside is that the code that could do something about the exception only has a NULL to work with instead of the actual Exception. I may change this eventually…

THE FUTURE!!!!!

I think this project could prove useful if it was cleaned up and given WSDL2.0 support. But I doubt I’ll spend too much time on it.

But, who knows!