[Nafees Sharif]

Hi,

I wrote a web service client against a WSDL file. Everything goes fine on my local machine, but when deployed on a remote machine, gives the following error:

Aug 10, 2009 6:00:20 PM com.sun.xml.ws.mex.client.MetadataClient retrieveMetadata
WARNING: MEX0008:Failed to parse metadata returned from server at file:/D:/__nece/daid/WebRoot/WEB-INF/wsdl/secondary/WSCheckXYZSoapHttpPort.wsdl using protocol SOAP_1_2. Continuing attempts.
...
...

… which is correct for obvious reasons that the WSDL file is not available at D:/__nece/… on a linux box. I looked into the auto-generated Service file and it has the absolute path hard coded in the file as below:

@WebServiceClient(name = “WSCheckXYZ”, targetNamespace = “http://companyABC/WSCheckXYZ.wsdl”, wsdlLocation = “file:/D:/__nece/daid/WebRoot/WEB-INF/wsdl/secondary/WSCheckXYZSoapHttpPort.wsdl”)

I googled around, and found solutions like using jax-ws-catalog.xml at https://jax-ws.dev.java.net/guide/Developing_client_application_with_locally_packaged_WSDL.html#Xml_Catalog. I found some nice links for other IDEs and a step-by-step instructions on how to do it, but couldn’t find anything for MyEclipse. I am putting my experience here so that other startes can benefit from it. I am using MyEclipse 7.5 with tomcat6 and JDK6 (By the way, i have also tested it with JBoss5 using JDK6 on both XP and Suse). So, here it goes:

0- Create a Web project (JEE 5 with JAX-WS 2.1) –
1- Put the WSDL file (against which client stubs have to be created) under WEB-INF/wsdl/secondary/ directory in your project. I just didn’t put it under WEB-INF/wsdl/ directory to differentiate between server WSDL and client WSDL (just a personel preferecne).
2- Right click the WSDL file, click MyEclipse -> New Web Service Client
3- Select Jax-WS, click Next
4- Make sure the path of WSDL file is exactly where you just put it in step 1 above.
5- Specify Java Package, click Next
6- Click Finish to end the wizard (assuming there are no valdiation/compliance issues in WSDL)
7- Right click WEB-INF, select New -> File
8- Specify file name as jax-ws-catalog.xml and click Finish
9- Open the newly created jax-ws-catalog.xml file and define the mapping from “absolute path” to “packaged URL” (see below for details).
10- Save and deploy and you should be fine!

What/How to jax-ws-catalog.xml?
For the above example, my jax-ws-catalog looked like this:

<catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog"
    prefer="system">
    <system
        systemId="file:/D:/__nece/daid/WebRoot/WEB-INF/wsdl/secondary/WSCheckXYZSoapHttpPort.wsdl"
        uri="wsdl/secondary/WSCheckXYZSoapHttpPort.wsdl" />
</catalog>

The only problem with this is that the value of /catalog/system/@systemId attribute will be different for each developer in the team (as each member may have different installation directories), which may cause little inconvenience at sync time.

Regards,
–mnsharif

[Nafees Sharif]

References:

https://jax-ws.dev.java.net/guide/Developing_client_application_with_locally_packaged_WSDL.html
http://forums.netbeans.org/viewtopic.php?t=7615
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/vivekp/archive/2007/06/index.html

[Nafees Sharif]

Another way of avoiding the following error is given at http://blog.vinodsingh.com/2008/05/webservice-endpoint.html.

Aug 10, 2009 6:00:20 PM com.sun.xml.ws.mex.client.MetadataClient retrieveMetadata
WARNING: MEX0008:Failed to parse metadata returned from server at file:/D:/__nece/daid/WebRoot/WEB-INF/wsdl/secondary/WSCheckXYZSoapHttpPort.wsdl using protocol SOAP_1_2. Continuing attempts.
...
... 

HTH!

Regards,
–mnsharif

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