How to Call a Soap Web Service on Android

How to call a SOAP web service on Android

Android does not provide any sort of SOAP library. You can either write your own, or use something like kSOAP 2. As you note, others have been able to compile and use kSOAP2 in their own projects, but I haven't had to.

Google has shown, to date, little interest in adding a SOAP library to Android. My suspicion for this is that they'd rather support the current trends in Web Services toward REST-based services, and using JSON as a data encapsulation format. Or, using XMPP for messaging. But that is just conjecture.

XML-based web services are a slightly non-trivial task on Android at this time. Not knowing NetBeans, I can't speak to the tools available there, but I agree that a better library should be available. It is possible that the XmlPullParser will save you from using SAX, but I don't know much about that.

Call a soap webservice in android

You can do any UI related operations in doInBackGround, So move them in onPostExecute methnod.

Because doInBackGround is not a UI thread. Please read AsyncTask Document carefully. Whatever is the data you are returning from doInBackGround, it is being taken as input to onPostExecute.

So change your code as follows,

    private class AsyncCallWS extends AsyncTask<Void, Void, Void> {

    @Override
    protected void onPreExecute() {
        Log.i(TAG, "onPreExecute");
    }

    @Override
    protected String[] doInBackground(Void... params) {
        Log.i(TAG, "doInBackground");
        String[] data = sendRequest();
        return data;
    }

    @Override
    protected void onPostExecute(String[] result) {
        Log.i(TAG, "onPostExecute");
        if(result != null && result.length > 0){
             textResult.setText( results[0]);
        }
    }

}


private String[] sendRequest(){
    SoapObject request = new SoapObject(NAMESPACE, METHOD_NAME);


    //SoapObject
    request.addProperty("@CountryName", "SPAIN");
    SoapSerializationEnvelope envelope = new SoapSerializationEnvelope(SoapEnvelope.VER11);
    envelope.setOutputSoapObject(request);


    androidHttpTransport = new HttpTransportSE(URL);
    try
    {
        androidHttpTransport.call(SOAP_ACTION, envelope);
        resultsRequestSOAP =  envelope.getResponse();
        String[] results = (String[])  resultsRequestSOAP;
    }
    catch (Exception aE)
    {
        aE.printStackTrace ();
    }
}

Calling Soap webservice from android

I have a hunch that the emulator android version and the phone version are different.

But I have few suggestions. Use following:

httppost.setHeader("Accept-Charset","utf-8");
httppost.setHeader("Accept","text/xml,application/text+xml,application/soap+xml");

similarly, set content type as all of the above.

Implementing SOAP api in Android

SOAP is XML protocol for describing objects. While it works over many different protocols, using it over HTTP is basically XML over HTTP with a few extras settings required (usually HTTP Headers) to make it work.

WSDL is metadata that is used to describe the web services hosted on a given endpoint well enough that it is machine readable. Many client generation libraries for Web Services exist that can create a client that can call the web services.

If you can already call the web service endpoint and get a response using the apache client, then you can more or less ignore WSDL and all that stuff. You are doing enough SOAP to invoke the Web Service.

Once you get the response, deserialise / parse the XML using your favourite XML library.

Android has a couple built in, you can do it the old fashioned way with the DOM, use a library built on top of the DOM like dom4j or even the really old fashioned way with SAX.

For really big XML messages you want to use a streaming parser like Stax, but generally the DOM is easier to get going.

Finally write your own and make sure you add an answer to this SO Question :)

Android WSDL/SOAP service client

Android doesn't come with SOAP library. However, you can download 3rd party library here:

https://github.com/simpligility/ksoap2-android

If you need help using it, you might find this thread helpful:

How to call a .NET Webservice from Android using KSOAP2?

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