Creating WSDL files with comments using Axis Java2WSDL tool

WSDL files produced by Axis Java2WSDL tool have no <wsdl:documentation> tags in the generated WSDL. You need these tags to make the WSDL file self-documenting. Stubs-generating tools, like WSDL2Java, may include content of the tags as comments into generated stub classes, making them also documented. Or you can use WSDLDoc tool to generate a nice Javadoc-style documentation for your webservice.

This page shows how to add them and also how to use that documented WSDL file as the file that Axis returns when asked by ?wsdl parameter.

Suppose that you have a WSDL file named MyService.wsdl produced by Java2WSDl tool. (If not, see this guide how to do it.) You may even have Ant build.xml file that generates it from Java source as needed, so you cannot edit it by hand to add any documentation tags. So a solution is to use XSLT transformation to that. Copy this XSLT stylesheet (source) and change the "documentation" target so that it adds your comments to your operations.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
        xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
        xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/"
        xmlns="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/"
        >
<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" />

<xsl:template match="wsdl:operation">
    <xsl:copy>
     <xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/>
     <xsl:call-template name="documentation" />
     <xsl:apply-templates select="node()"/>
    </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="documentation">
   <xsl:choose>
   <xsl:when test="@name='getSomething'">
     <wsdl:documentation>Returns something</wsdl:documentation>
   </xsl:when>
   </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="@*|node()">
    <xsl:copy> <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/> </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

If you have an Ant build file that generates the WSDL file, change it so that it is written to, say, MyService_gen.wsdl and the use following code to add the documentation:

    <java classname="com.icl.saxon.StyleSheet" dir="." fork="yes"
          classpathref="some.path" failonerror="true" >
      <arg value="-o"/> <arg value="${build}/MyService.wsdl"/>
      <arg value="${build}/MyService_gen.wsdl"/>
      <arg value="${src}/wsdl.xsl"/>
    </java>

 <wsdlFile>/MyService.wsdl</wsdlFile>

Last updated: $Date: 2004/08/20 11:41:29 $