What is the best way of testing a custom web service

Question

We have a custom developed service (a jar sitting in the xmlpserver/WEB-INF/lib folder) on the BI Publisher server. This service uses the BookBinder class to concatenate some documents.
We call this service through Axis (PublicReportService_v11) from a 3rd party application, passing in all the details to complete the call.
I inherited this peace of code and now I need to build some kind of automated test to make sure the service is properly tested. We are using version 10.1.3.4.1.
I started writing a Java application to send requests but I'm not too sure how to call our custom service. The code looks something like this:
import org.apache.axis.client.Call;
import org.apache.axis.client.Service;
import javax.xml.namespace.QName;
public class Test_Web_Service
public static void main(String [] args) throws Exception {
try {
String endpoint = "http://bipserver:port/xmlpserver/services/PublicReportService_v11";
Service service = new Service();
Call call= (Call) service.createCall();
call.setProperty( call.USERNAME_PROPERTY, "bob" );
call.setProperty( call.SPASSWORD_PROPERTY, "pw");
call.setTargetEndpointAddress( new java.net.URL(endpoint) );
call.setOperationName(new QName("http://bipserver:port/xmlpserver/services/PublicReportService_v11","myCustomService"));
String ret = (String) call.invoke( new Object[] {""} );
System.out.println("Sent '20', got '" + ret + "'");
} catch (Exception e) {
System.err.println(e.toString());
I'm getting a NullPointerException.
Edited by: user612544 on 28-Feb-2013 07:13

Answer 1

I'd recommend a tool like SoapUI (http://www.soapui.org/) - the basic version is free and probably all you'll need.
Barry Goodsell.
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