Webservices: returning xml document to client

Question

Can anyone please help me to the following problem.
1. I have a java bean which i publish as webservice. I want to return an xml document on request from client(for time being my client is normal java client). when i call getDoc() from client i get classload exception. can anyone explain me why?
public org.w3c.dom.Document getDoc() throws java.rmi.RemoteException {
Document document = null;
DocumentBuilderFactory factory =
DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
try {
DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
document = builder.parse( new File("C:\\data\\RND\\XmlParser\\XmlParser\\src\\xmlparser\\employer.xml"));
catch (Exception ex) {
return document;
2. if i have to send a xml file to clinet on request using web services(i assume i cant return an document as above), is it feasible(my xml file is a transaction file) to send a xml file as string?
3. how to transfer a xml file into a string?

Answer 1

I'm almost sure that the error is because the Document class is not supported by JAX-RPC (see page 384 of the Java Web Services Tutorial).
Try sending your XML as a String.
This code may help you to transform between XML and String and viceversa:
import javax.xml.parsers.*;
import javax.xml.transform.*;
import org.xml.sax.*;
import org.w3c.dom.*;
public static Document toXmlDocument(String xml) throws IOException, SAXException, ParserConfigurationException
StringReader reader = new StringReader(xml);
InputSource source = new InputSource(reader);
DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document xmlDoc = builder.parse(source);
return ( xmlDoc );
public static String toXmlString(Node node) throws TransformerConfigurationException, TransformerException
StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
DOMSource source = new DOMSource(node);
TransformerFactory factory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
Transformer transformer = factory.newTransformer();
StreamResult result = new StreamResult(writer);
transformer.transform(source,result);
return ( writer.toString() );
}