Changing the endpoint location for a JAX-WS SE Client

Some things JAX-WS makes easy; but other things are not so obvious. One of the quite common issues that confuses developer new to this area is how you change the endpoint location for a web service proxy/client without having to regenerate/recompile the code.

It turns out you have to make use of one of those maps I enumerated in my previous entry and your code needs to looks something like this:

 1  import java.net.URI;

 2  import java.net.URL;
 3  
 4  import java.util.Map;

 5  
 6  import javax.xml.ws.BindingProvider;
 7  import javax.xml.ws.WebServiceRef;

 8  
 9  import project2.proxy.Hello;
10  import project2.proxy.HelloService;
16  

17  public class HelloPortClient
18  {
19    @WebServiceRef
20    private static HelloService helloService;

21  
22    public static void main(String [] args)

23    {
24      helloService = new HelloService();
25      Hello hello = helloService.getHelloPort();

26      setEndpointAddress(hello, "http://some.new.addr/endpoint");
27   
28      hello.sayHello("Bob");

29    }
30   
31   
32   
33    public static void setEndpointAddress(Object port, String newAddress) {

34        assert port instanceof BindingProvider : "Doesn't appear to be a valid port";
35        assert newAddress !=null :"Doesn't appear to be a valid address";

36   
37        //
38   
39        BindingProvider bp = (BindingProvider)port;

40        Map<String, Object> context = bp.getRequestContext();

41        Object oldAddress = context.get(BindingProvider.ENDPOINT_ADDRESS_PROPERTY);

42        context.put(
43          BindingProvider.ENDPOINT_ADDRESS_PROPERTY,
44          newAddress);

45    }
46  }

Note that I extracted the relevant code into a separate method, this you would probably want to move to some kind of utility class. For some reason there isn't a nice helper method to do this that comes with JAX-WS; but hopefully they will fix this in a future revision.

Update: As noted by Kurt in the comments you will probably need to have a local copy of the WSDL in order for this to work properly. Most tools will have an option to help you do this.

Update 22nd Dec 2008: After considering the problem in the real world a little bit more in the cases where you might have policies defined I now consider it better to alter the WSDL location rather than just the endpoint. This means that any extra policies on the new server are read and processed. You could do this using web.xml or a jax-ws catalog file, both can be updated at deploy time with a deployment plan.