faultstring SOAPAction /faultstring --- Error in Axis Adapter

Question

Hi All,
I am doing an sender https scenario. My end customer uses ariba to send messages to XI. They dont want to use username and pwd to send the document. So we have eliminated the soap adapter (because it asks for username and pwd to send the request). Now we are using axis adapter (where we have removed the user and pwd paramters in axis adapter itself). So it dont ask for username and pwd anymore for any of the axis comm. channel.
Now the issue is when we send a https request to my url(I have created wsdl using xI and took the url from it) using SOAP UI I am able to get it into xi. But when they use ariba or Fiddler (we can download free for testing) they are getting an error message like:
<soapenv:Body>
  <soapenv:Fault>
   <faultcode xmlns:ns1="http://xml.apache.org/axis/">ns1:Client.NoSOAPAction</faultcode>
   <faultstring>SOAPAction</faultstring>
   <detail>
    <ns2:stackTrace xmlns:ns2="http://xml.apache.org/axis/">SOAPAction
     at com.sap.aii.adapter.axis.web.ServletReceiverCore.getSoapAction(ServletReceiverCore.java:665)
     at com.sap.aii.adapter.axis.web.ServletReceiverCore.doPost(ServletReceiverCore.java:273)
     at com.sap.aii.adapter.axis.web.MessageServlet.doPost(MessageServlet.java:392)
     at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:760)
     at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:853)
When I researched this it seems xi is expecting a soap action. But they dont have an option to add the soap action on their side. Now I am struck what to do.
When I googled for this error, it seems it is not error with xi, it is with the apache axis itself. It seems like by default apache axis expects a soapaction and if we dont want to send then we need to give soapaction as "" (which is null). I dont know where to give this. I assume that we need to change the jar file somewhere on axis adapter. No idea where it is and what to do with this approach.
Also I have seen stefans weblog:
/people/stefan.grube/blog/2006/09/21/using-the-soap-inbound-channel-of-the-integration-engine
With this first I need to create an https abap port. Then I can use soap adapter directly by sending username and pwd directly to the url. But the catch here is also to send soapaction which in our case is not possible.
Can anyone of you please help me out.
Regards,
---Satish

Answer 1

Satish,
I think the easiest solution is to
1. configure https on the ABAP stack: in trx STRUST you can use the same SSL certificate used to setup SSL in the KeyStorage service of V.A. so that calling the ABAP http or the J2EE http will be copletely transaprent to your SSL client (i.e. ARIBA)
2. use HTTP plain adapter ( <host>:<abap_https_port>/sap/xi/adapter_plain )
- you get rid of the SOAP envelope and SOAP action issue, as the XML payload posted by Ariba will be immediately treated as a PI message payload
- here also you can use the same two parameters as per Stefan's blog (&sap-user=<username>&sap-password=<password>) and thus get rid of the authentication issue.
Stuff sent to the plain_adapter is handled by the CL_HTTP_PLAIN_INBOUND class (use trx SE24 to take a look) and method IF_HTTP_EXTENSION~HANDLE_REQUEST: there are a number of parameters that can be supplied by the client calling it (i.e. Ariba). See below an excerpt.
* call-syntax:  XI 3
* http://hostname:port/path
*                      ?namespace=???
*                      &interface=???
*                      &service=???
*                      &party=???
*                      &agency=???
*                      &scheme=???
*                      [&qos= EO|BE|EOIO]
*                      [&msgguid=???]
*                      [&queueid=???]
*                      [&trace=[1|2|3]]
I am strongly convinced that this is the far easiest solution. Programming Axis handlers can be tricky though fascinating (I've written a nice one I'll probably blog about as soon as I get a chance.) But I will nevertheless try to simulate your Axis issue when I get access to a machine like your own.
Cheers,
Alex