When exposing Web services through WSO2 WSAS, you may need to capture the SOAP message flow between your client application and Web service. WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) comes with a SOAP Tracer which can be used to view the request and response messages.

In this document, we will invoke the default version service which is shipped with WSO2 WSAS and capture the message flow using the SOAP Tracer.

 

Prerequisites

The procedure explained below depends on WSO2 WSAS 2.0 or later, so please install it as described in the WSAS installation guide.

 

Step 1

Log in to the WSO2WSAS management console as the default admin user (admin/admin)

Step 2

Click on Tracer in the left navigation menu of the management console.

Step 3

Enable SOAP tracing by selecting ON from the list.

 

Step 4

Now you can either invoke a Web service through an external client or just use the TryIt feature included in the WSAS management console.

Step 5

Select Services in the left navigation menu of the WSAS management console.

Step 6

Click on the default Version service available under the services column of the service management table.

Step 7

Click Try it.

 

Step 8

Click getVersion on the Try the Version Service page.

Step 9

Once you get the response, go to the SOAP Tracer page again.

Step 10

You can see that the SOAP request and responses are in the SOAP Message - Request and SOAP Message - Response boxes respectively.

As described above, the SOAP Tracer is a valuable and user-friendly tool to capture the messages transmitted in Web service invocation. When turning the tracer on, SOAP messages are completely built and stored in the WSAS database. Hence, the server performance can be significantly degraded.

Applies To

WSO2 WSAS 2.0 and newer versions

More Information

WSO2 WSAS User's Guide [1]

WSO2 WSAS How To Series [1]