Frequently Asked Questions on Apache Axis2

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Content of Questions and Answers

General

  1. I'm having a problem using Axis2. What should I do?

    First make sure you go through user guide and this FAQ. If you are using a released version of Axis2, then there is a possibility that your problem has already being fixed in the latest code. Download Axis2 nightly builds from here and test again with it.

    If the problem still persists then try to search for your question in our developer or user mailing archives as it might have already being answered.

    If your problem is not answered in the mailing list, now it is the best time to post your question to axis-user mailing list. If you think it is a bug, please fill a bug report in JIRA. Please attach all the supportive information, like your wsdl, schema, clients, services, stacktraces, etc., to the JIRA issue you created, as it will help one of our contributors to re-create the problem. PLEASE DO NOT ASK QUESTIONS USING JIRA AND USE IT ONLY AS A ISSUE TRACKER.

    If you are asking for an explanation of a feature in Axis2, there is a possibility that there is an article or FAQ written on it. Please do a search on the web as there are lot of article written and hosted by various sources on the web.

    Note : When you ask questions in the mailing list, please remember that everyone working in our project are volunteers. No-one can be forced to fix your bugs (check here).

               Make sure you add enough information about your problem with stacktraces and any other supportive information. It will improve the chances of your question being answered. Prefixing your mail subject with prefixes like "URGENT" will not help you in any means. Yes we also accept all the blames about Axis2 in these mailing lists, as those will definitely help us to improve Axis2 :) .

  2. Integration security tests fail with JDK 1.5

    You have to add Bouncy Castle as a JCE provider. Add the following entry to java.security file of the appropriate JRE on your machine. This file is available in the lib\security\ directory within the JRE directory.

    security.provider.7=org.bouncycastle.jce.provider.BouncyCastleProvider

    security.provider.# will have to be decided depending on the existing entries in the java.security file

    NOTE: For Windows XP the correct version can be found using 'java -version'. The correct file is JRE (typically c:\Program Files\Java\jre<version>\lib\security\java.security.

Class Loading Issues

  1. How do I access resources that I put into my service /module archive file?

    2. Axis2 has the notion of service isolation where each service or module gets its own class loader. Using this class loader you can access any resource that you put into your service archive file. You may want to access your resources from different locations. For example,

    1. A third party module wants to access your resources, then the scenario is as follows:

       AxisService myService =
   messageContext.getAxisConfiguration().getAxisService("serviceName");

    or

       AxisService myService = msgCtx.getAxisService();

    Then you can ask for service class loader using which you can access its resources

       ClassLoader clsLoader = myService.getServiceClassLoader();
   clsLoader.getResourceAsStream("myResource");

    2. To initialize service implementation class at the MessageReceiver level the following steps need to be taken

       AxisService service = msgCtx.getAxisService();
   ClassLoader clsLoader = service.getServiceClassLoader();
   Class.forName("serviceName",clsLoader,true);

    NOTE : Axis2 default MessageReciver uses the same technique to initialize service implementations

    3. If you want to load your resources at the service implementation class then the scenario is as follows

       getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("myResource");

Client API

  1. I want to do request response Messaging, Where should I look?

    Look at the ServiceClient class, for more information please read the User's Guide

  2. I want to do One Way Messaging, Where should I look?

    From Axis2 0.94 onwards, both request-response and one way messaging will be handled by ServiceClient.

  3. When I try to do a non blocking call with 
    useSeparateListener=true
    I get the error to do two Transport Channels the Addressing Modules must be engaged, Why is this?

    To do the two transport Channel invocation you need to engage the addressing module. You can enable it by un-commenting the entry in the axis2.xml file or Call.engageModule(QName). But addressing is enabled by default.

  4. I have engaged addressing and when I was trying to invoke a service I am getting an exception

    If you have engaged addressing , then you have to have wsa:action, the required WS-Addressing header. so you have to call
    option.setAction("urn:myaction");
    It should be not that the action should be a URI.

  5. What is Axis2 Repository?

    Repository stores the configuration of Axis2, the users should specify the repository folder starting the Axis Server (HTTP or TCP). In the case of tomcat it is the webapps/axis2/WEB-INF folder. Following picture shows a sample repository.

    Modules and services have a archive format defined and they are automatically picked up by Axis2 when they are copied to corresponding folders.

Maven

  1. I just installed maven and it gives an error when I was trying to run maven on Axis2 ......

    Axis2 requires itest plugin to run some of the tests. Better get it using following command.

  2. I have problems building with maven 1.1 ....

    It seems that maven 1.1 doesn't come bundled with the required artifact plugin. Run following to get it updated

  3. What versions of maven are supported? ....

    Versions 1.0.2 and 1.1 are supported. Maven2 as of yet is not supported.

  4. What are the frequently used maven commands?

    5. Command
    Description
    maven
    download relevant jars, if not available and compile and run tests of the system.
    maven clean Clean all the stuff build so far, that are in the target folder. This will not clean the jar repository
    maven test
    run only the tests. Will do automatic compilation of changed sources as well. This will not run soap interop tests
    maven clean all-tests
    Clean up and run all off line and on line tests
    maven itest
    To run the online-mode tests for say the modules/integration Run "maven itest" from modules/integration
    maven test itest
    To run all tests for say the modules/integration Run "maven test itest" from modules/integration
    maven -g
    List down all the commands available with maven
    maven multiproject
    generate this site
    maven idea:multiproject
    generate IDEA .ipr, .iml and .iws project files
    maven -Dmaven.test.skip=true
    		 Builds Axis2 and skips all the tests
    maven dist-min-bin Will generate the binary version of Axis2 minimal distribution
    maven dist-min-src Will generate the source version of Axis2 minimal distribution
    maven dist-std-bin Will generate the binary version of Axis2 standard distribution
    maven dist-std-bin Will generate the source version of Axis2 standard distribution
    maven release Generate all the distributales for Axis2
    maven clean jar -Dmaven.test.skip=true -o This will clean all the target folder and compile your source, without running the tests or downloading snapshots of dependancies. This is the quickest way of compiling Axis2 sources. However it is highly recommended to run the tests all the time

Services

  1. How do I have multiple services in one service archive?

    2. It's just a matter of writing a services.xml file to configure the service or services in an archive file. The corresponding services.xml SHOULD look like below:

       <serviceGroup>
   <service name="myService1">
   ...........................
   </service>

   <service name="myService2">
   ...........................
   </service>
   <serviceGroup>

    NOTE : The name attribute is a compulsory attribute which will become the name of the services. But if you want to have one service in the archive file then there are two options, either have one service inside serviceGroup tag or have only one service tag as shown below in your services.xml, in which case, name of the service will be the name of the archive file and you can not override that.

       <service>
   ...............
   <service>

Web Archive / Server side

  1. I see an internal server error page when I try to view the WSDL file.

    This happens specifically with tomcat 4.x and 5.0 in a JDK 1.5 environment. The reason is that the system picks up a wrong transformer factory class. This can be solved simply by putting the xalan-2.7.0.jar (found here) into the axis2/WEB-INF/lib directory

WSDL and Code Generation

  1. Given a WSDL 2.0 document with HTTP Binding to WSDL2Java, should it not be able to generate a client stub similar to what happens given a WSDL 1.1 document with SOAP Binding?

    2. WSDL 2.0 is not supported yet. We do not have a working WSDL 2.0 reader.

    However the codegen engine works off WOM (not WSDL4J) hence if the WSDL 2.0 reader is done, we are all set to generate code for it.

    And yes, it is perfectly possible for the codegen to generate code for the HTTP binding. We already have the client API support for making the REST calls and it should be a matter of putting in a correct template.