The Java EE 5 Tutorial

Adding Content to the SOAPPart Object

If the content you want to send is in a file, SAAJ provides an easy way to add it directly to the SOAPPart object. This means that you do not access the SOAPBody object and build the XML content yourself, as you did in the preceding section.

To add a file directly to the SOAPPart object, you use a javax.xml.transform.Source object from JAXP (the Java API for XML Processing). There are three types of Source objects: SAXSource, DOMSource, and StreamSource. A StreamSource object holds an XML document in text form. SAXSource and DOMSource objects hold content along with the instructions for transforming the content into an XML document.

The following code fragment uses the JAXP API to build a DOMSource object that is passed to the SOAPPart.setContent method. The first three lines of code get a DocumentBuilderFactory object and use it to create the DocumentBuilder object builder. Because SOAP messages use namespaces, you should set the NamespaceAware property for the factory to true. Then builder parses the content file to produce a Document object.

DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder builder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document document = builder.parse("file:///music/order/soap.xml");
DOMSource domSource = new DOMSource(document);

The following two lines of code access the SOAPPart object (using the SOAPMessage object message) and set the new Document object as its content. The SOAPPart.setContent method not only sets content for the SOAPBody object but also sets the appropriate header for the SOAPHeader object.

SOAPPart soapPart = message.getSOAPPart();

The XML file you use to set the content of the SOAPPart object must include Envelope and Body elements:


You will see other ways to add content to a message in the sections Adding a Document to the SOAP Body and Adding Attachments.