How to effectively test Spring Web Services (that don't use SOAP)

[Mike London]

We have a suite of Spring Web Services we need to test, but it appears that using Spring's WebServiceTemplate testing framework won't work for us because our Spring Web Services don't have any SOAP envelopes.

Instead, we dynamically, via Reflection, figure out what method to call based on the outer element in the XML.

I haven't seen any way to keep WebServiceTemplate from sending the SOAP envelope.

This is what WebServiceTemplate sends:

<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"><SOAP-ENV:Header/><SOAP-ENV:Body><actual request starts here....></SOAP-ENV:Body></SOAP-ENV:Envelope>]

This is what we want to send:

<the RAW XML Request Only>

Because our web service does not use SOAP, SOAP UI is similarly not working. No WSDL "operation" tags, for example.

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So, my questions are these:

1. Is there a way to use WebServiceTemplate, but have it ONLY send the Raw XML Request (but no soap surrounding tags like shown above)?

Using WebServiceTemplate with a non-SOAP Spring WS Web Service results in this error:

org.springframework.ws.client.WebServiceTransportException: Not Found [404]

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2. What testing frameworks would be best for testing XML-only Spring Web Services (especially if WebServiceTemplate won't work)?

I was hoping WebServiceTemplate would work, but I'm not sure now.

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Look forward to any advice or suggestions.

Thanks. mike