Is there a guaranteed way to get operation name in a custom soap handler?

Question

I have a custom SOAP message handler for incoming messages that will run different code based on which operation is being called. My first try to get the operation name looked something liket this:

public boolean handleMessage(SOAPMessageContext context)
{
    String op = context.get(MessageContext.WSDL_OPERATION);
    ...

This failed because the property MessageContext.WSDL_OPERATION appears to never be set. I then tried using this:

public boolean handleMessage(SOAPMessageContext context)
{
    Map<?, ?> headers = (Map<?, ?>)context.get(MessageContext.HTTP_REQUEST_HEADERS);    
    ArrayList<String> SOAPAction = ((ArrayList<String>) headers.get("SOAPAction"));
    String opName = SOAPAction.get(0);
    //opName will be formatted like "urn#myOperation", so the prefix must be removed
    opName = ((opName.replace("\"","").split("#"))[1]);

This works, but I'm concerned there could be situations where the header property "SOAPAction" isn't set (or doesn't even exist), or does not have the value that I'm expecting it to. I'm also a little concerned because I don't know if this is an "official" way to get the operation name - I figured it out by looking at the contents of context in the debugger.

Is there any better way to get the operation name when handling incoming SOAP messages?

Answer 1

I'm very late to this party but I tried to do this over the past week. The accepted answer doesn't actually work for every JAX-WS implementation (at least not that I tried).

I have been trying to make this work on standalone Metro in my development environment but also using Axis2 bundled with WebSphere 7 in a real environment.

I found the following works on Metro:

String operationName = body.getChildNodes().item(0).getLocalName();

and the following works on Axis2:

String operationName = body.getChildNodes().item(1).getLocalName();

What is happening is that Axis2 inserts a Node of type Text into the Body as the first child but Metro doesn't. This text node returns a null local name. My solution was to do the following:

NodeList nodes = body.getChildNodes();

// -- Loop over the nodes in the body.
for (int i=0; i<nodes.getLength(); i++) {
  Node item = nodes.item(i);

  // -- The first node of type SOAPBodyElement will be
  // -- what we're after.
  if (item instanceof SOAPBodyElement) {
    return item.getLocalName();
  }
}

As described in the comments we're actually looking for the first node of type SOAPBodyElement. Hopefully that will help out anyone else looking at this in the future.