Invoking WSO2 Carbon admin services with soapUI

The management aspects of WSO2 Carbon platform are primarily achieved through SOAP web services interface known as admin services. All Carbon products ship with a management console (front-end user interface) which communicates with these web services and provides users with various administration capabilities.

In some situations, we need to by-pass the management UI and call the backend web services directly. Specially, in test automation, it is important to minimize the risk of frequent UI changes hence focusing on admin service interactions can be considered as a viable solution. WSO2 test automation framework is built upon this approach which programatically calls the backend web services to manage deployment, configuration and various other tasks.

These backend web services are secured to prevent anonymous invocations. WSO2 Carbon server secures these services through multiple methodologies. For example;

• HTTP Basic Authentication over SSL

• WS-Security username token

• Session based authentication

You can use any SOAP client and communicates with the admin services by authenticating through above security protocols.

In this post, I will take  you through consuming an admin service using soapUI since soapUI is the most user-friendly service testing tool out there to test SOAP or RESTful web services.

We will use HTTP basic auth authentication mechanism out of the auth options described above. If you like to use a different approach such as carbon session based authentication, you may refer to Nandika's blog post.

Pre-requisite:
soapUI 4.5.1 or later
WSO2 Carbon 4.X version (You can use any member product of WSO2 Carbon family)

Step 1

By default, the WSDLs of admin web services are hidden from consumers. Therefore, we need to enable them first to import admin service WSDL into a soapUI project.

Open CARBON_HOME/repository/conf/carbon.xml and set HideAdminServiceWSDLs property to false.

<HideAdminServiceWSDLs>false</HideAdminServiceWSDLs> 

Start WSO2 Carbon server.

Step 2

 

There are large number of admin services which serve many administration and management functionalities such as ServiceAdmin, StatisticsAdmin, ProxyAdmin etc.. However, I will use a simplest admin service, UserAdmin for this example.

Open  https://localhost:9443/services/UserAdmin?wsdl in your browser and check whether it is accessible.

Step 3

Create a SOAP web service project in soapUI using the above WSDL

Step 4

We are going to invoke one of the web services operations exposed through UserAdmin web service. Select listAllUsers operation under UserAdminSoap11Binding interface and click on SOAP request.

Step 5

We are going to submit listAllUsers SOAP request using HTTP basic authentication headers. Therefore, click on Aut tab under the bottom of the request editor and specify the admin  user name and password of carbon server.

Enter the following values for the required parameters of the SOAP request.

<xsd:filter>*</xsd:filter>
 <xsd:limit>100</xsd:limit>

Step 6

Now, we can submit the request to UserAdmin web service.You will get a SOAP response with all users available in the user store of Carbon server.