Dealing with JAX-RPC WSDL on Apache NetBeans 11 in 2019
It was 2011 when I first started at my current positon , and we were using Netbeans 6.X (not sure about the number preceeding the dot). Even back then , dealing with the JAX-RPC web service client plugin and Netbeans was not a smooth experience . Not much changed , if only, it got worse , as I moved on to 7.4,8 and so forth.
Year 2019 , Here I am using apache netbeans 11 and once again I had to use some RPC encoded WSDL , some 15+ years old API that we consume for exposing various telecommunication services via modern APIs of our own . I couldn’t find an easy way to install this archaic plugin to netbeans 11 , but finally did so via downloading some nbm files and adding through Plugins menu. At least , I thought so , seeing that the JAX-RPC Web Services Plugin was listed and Active .
So I went on and tried to add a new Web Service Client dialog , but i kept getting the error message : “This wsdl is rpc encoded.To process this wsdl install the JAX-RPC Web Services Plugin” . And I was simply stuck at this step , no matter what I tried (downloading various early releases of NetBeans and try my luck , to be frank).
At my moment of despair , I stumbled up on a google result of GitHub repo : JAX-RPC Maven Plugin . Maybe there are better options out there , but to my knowledge , this plugin saved my life. By Just adding this plugin to my project file and created another file for a simple configuration , showing the path for the WSDL file , and to provide the package name for the created classes. The version of com.sun.xml.rpc:1.1.3_01 didn’t work for me , so I used 1.1.5 instead.
The only downside , I would say , is the configuration file taking only one WSDL at a time . I added 3 wsdl tags and there was an error. Maybe there’s a different way of configuration for it , I’m not sure. I just made this work by creating sources one by one for 3 WSDLs and copying the generated sources next to my source codes.
On a reply to the only issue on the repo , the author says that he’s not familiar with NetBeans , but this approach above works perfectly. I feel that I’m not afraid of RPC encoded WSDLs anymore.
