Is it possible to configure JAX-WS services with an external descriptor?

[carlo.bonamico]

Hi,

I had to manage a situation similar to https://community.jboss.org/thread/146575 where a JBoss instance publishes a JaxWs service (annotated with @WebService) on plain http:// on an internal network, and an external Apache httpd server with mod_proxy or mod_jk re-publishes the service over https:// on the outside. The environment is JBoss-WS on JBoss AS 5.1.0.

In order to be able to rewrite the soap:address field in the WSDL I successfully followed @asoldano advice:

>Something else you might want to try is setting your soap:address to something like "https://REPLACE-ME", that should force the https protocol to be use in the soap:address when rewriting it. I think this probably has the side effect of overwriting the webServicePort you might want to >specify though.

Then enabled rewriting of the address in

jbossws.deployer/META-INF/jboss-beans.xml

<bean name="ServiceEndpointManager" class="org.jboss.ws.server.ServiceEndpointManager">
      <!--
        The WSDL, that is a required deployment artifact for an endpoint, has a <soap:address>
        element which points to the location of the endpoint. JBoss supports rewriting of that SOAP address.
     
        If the content of <soap:address> is a valid URL, JBossWS will not rewrite it unless AlwaysModifySOAPAddress is true.
        If the content of <soap:address> is not a valid URL, JBossWS will rewrite it using the attribute values given below.
      -->
      <property name="webServiceHost">www.external.domain.com</property>
      <property name="webServiceSecurePort">443</property>
      <property name="alwaysModifySOAPAddress">true</property>
      ...
    </bean>

In this way the resulting url exposed in the wsdl is https://www.external.domain.com/path/... which is what I needed to achieve.

However, apparently this only works for services which have an associated wsdl file provided by the developer (@WebService(wsdlLocation = "WEB-INF/...")) in the deployment. I would like to enable a similar behavior on services which have only the defining implementation class.

Is it possible to associate to an @WebService class an external deployment descriptor which only specifies soap:address and/or other specific jaxws parameters, without having to explcitely create (and obviously maintain over time) the wsdlby hand?

In general, I think that this scenario is not so uncommin, and it would be useful to have a parameter as suggested by @asoldano to simply enable rewriting of http:// into https://

>If nothing of this helps, please create a feature request jira. We might think about adding another configuration option (webServiceProtocol) and achieve what you want throught that.

[asoldano]

We should probably check if this is still the behaviour with current JBossWS-CXF 4.x / JBoss AS 7.1.x and possibly create a bug jira, as this looks like a bug, the server should be rewriting wsdl soap:address regardless of that coming from an automatically generated contract (java first) or not.

[carlo.bonamico]

Hi Alessio,

the server does rewrite the host in both cases (external wsdl and annotations-only), but it does not rewrite the protocol. Following your suggestion

>Something else you might want to try is setting your soap:address to something like "https://REPLACE-ME", that should force the https protocol to be use in the soap:address when rewriting it. I think this probably has the side effect of overwriting the webServicePort you might want to >specify though.

I used an external wsdl file to specify this https://replaceme address.

Is it possible to specify the address via annotations and/or just an external descriptor (similarl to metro's sun-jaxws.xml)? I would like to avoid explicitely saving the wsdl in order not to maintain its changes when the @WebService annotation class changes.

[asoldano]

Are you enforcing the CONFIDENTIAL transport guarantee for you endpoint? (through web.xml for pojo deployments or @WebContext(transportGuarantee = ...) for EJB3 endpoints)

[carlo.bonamico]

I think I cannot, since Jboss exposes the service over plain HTTP and it is up to the Apache HTTPD + mod_proxy to do the HTTPS encoding in our architecture.

[asoldano]

ok, right. Well, to answer your question, of course there's no such annotation / additional descriptor for this. I'll do some tests and finally create a jira for this additional feature.

[carlo.bonamico]

Hi Alessio, thanks! I understand that there is no annotation to enable just address rewriting to https while the service is actually http. In order to manage the situation at the moment we are using the trick that you suggested

>Something else you might want to try is setting your soap:address to something like "https://REPLACE-ME", that should force the https protocol to be use in the soap:address when rewriting it.

So at the moment we are specifying this https://replace-me fake address in the manually defined wsdl.

[ncwoehler]

Hi Alessio, did you already file an jira issue for this? We are facing the same problem and I would like to vote for this issue.

[shashi53013]

Can anyone please summarize the solution to the above problem as we facing identical problem with the same configurations.as that specified by CARLO.

CARLO can you please provide more information on the file/location where the https://REPLACE-ME" is to be placed.