Web Service Object Parameters and JAXB

Question

Hi All,
This is my first post here and I'm hoping one of you might have encountered a similar problem before. One of our business partners provided us with a WSDL for their service, with an embedded XML schema. My job in this case is to write a message driven bean (MDB) that will take a message containing XML off of a queue and call this web service. However, their web service requires an object to be passed as input. So, I've used JAXB to generate a set of classes (from the schema I ripped out of their WSDL) that will unmarshal the XML document that comes off the queue. This works fine, however, the resulting object is an inherently different object than the object I need to pass to the web service, that one was created by auto-generating the Java proxy for the web service. Since these two classes come from the same schema definition, they have the same structure and can hold the same data, but they have different implementations. My plan is to write a method to copy the data from one object to another, but this feels redundant. Is there any approach I could use to make these two auto-generated sets of code be more compatible, other than the obvious answer of having written everything by hand? Thanks in advance for any replies.

Answer 1

Are the XML instances coming from the queue and the request object to the WS defined by the same schema (from the business partner)? If they are different, there's no other option than to do a copy or some sort of XSLT (not that that's any easier though). But if the instances are defined by the same schema, just use some data binding framework that you can use for both reading the XML from the queue and that is incorporated into the WS toolkit you're using.
For example, Axis2 allows you to use XMLBeans as a the data binding framework. Using the generated classes from Axis2, you can read in the XML instances from the queue and at the same time have the request object for the WS call.