Testing Webservice or wsdl with SOAP UI

Testing a webservice is very easy and it can be done within minutes using SOAP UI.

The best thing about SOAP UI is that it’s a free and open source application, meaning anyone can have free access to the full source code. Because soapUI is Java-based, it works on most operating systems, including Windows, Linux and Mac. It also means you can modify or customize it any way you like. And you can find everything you need to know about soapUI at its official site soapUI.org.

Pre-requisite: We need a wsdl and that too up and running on a server. You can create your own wsdl file from my previous post below. 

http://helptodeveloper.blogspot.com/2012/09/creating-basic-webservice-example.html


 To check whether the service is up or not, you can just type the wsdl url in you web browser (there should be ?wsdl at the end of your url), you should see an xml file in your browser.

example of wsdl url: http://<host > : < port>/axis2/services/PalinServ?wsdl

Download SOAP-UI (I used the 4.5.1 version for this example). Once you have installed and run it, create a new project as below.

I am using a wsdl from my previous post http://helptodeveloper.blogspot.com/2012/09/creating-basic-webservice-example.html which returns whether the given number is Palindrome or not..

Give a name to the project and give our wsdl url in the section provided, and check the 'Create Requests' and 'Create TestSuite' (most often used by testers) and click OK button.

NOTE: Make sure our service is up and RUNNING.

We can see our operations in the next window, make selections as shown below and click on OK button.

Provide a name for TestSuite.

 

It will ask for both SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2, repeat the same steps for SOAP 1.2 also.

Now click on any request from either SOAP 1.1 or SOAP 1.2, you can see the request how exactly it is going to send to our service using SOAP. Shown below is the request from the SOAP 1.2 request.

Give parameters in the args0 tag in place of the "?" and click on the green play/run button in the left top corner of window Request 1. Then you can see the webservice response in the right most window of the Request 1.

Here is the output for a non-palindrome number.

Below is the output for an invalid input, you might be wondering how the SOAP UI has identified it as an "Invalid value"!

We can find the reason for the above fault code in the wsdl file where the data type is defined as int, see below the snippet from wsdl file

<xs:element minOccurs="0" name="args0" type="xs:int"/>