How to consume a SOAP based web service from java

This post describes how we can access SOAP based web service from java using ksoap2 library. ksoap is a SOAP web service client library for constrained Java environments.

First download ksoap2:
https://code.google.com/p/ksoap2-android/wiki/HowToUse?tm=2
Then create a java project in Eclipse and add ksoap library to java build path.
Here is the sample code that can be used to access Currency Convertor web service hosted by http://www.webservicex.net
 

package com.mycode.soap;

import java.io.IOException;
import org.ksoap2.SoapEnvelope;
import org.ksoap2.serialization.PropertyInfo;
import org.ksoap2.serialization.SoapObject;
import org.ksoap2.serialization.SoapPrimitive;
import org.ksoap2.serialization.SoapSerializationEnvelope;
import org.ksoap2.transport.HttpTransportSE;
import org.xmlpull.v1.XmlPullParserException;

public class SoapTest {

 public static void main(String[] args) {
  try {
   final String NAMESPACE = "http://www.webserviceX.NET/";
   final String URL = "http://www.webservicex.net/CurrencyConvertor.asmx";
   final String SOAP_ACTION = "http://www.webserviceX.NET/ConversionRate";
   final String METHOD_NAME = "ConversionRate";
   SoapObject request = new SoapObject(NAMESPACE, METHOD_NAME);
   //set properties 
   PropertyInfo fromProp = new PropertyInfo();
   fromProp.setName("FromCurrency");
   fromProp.setValue("USD");
   fromProp.setType(String.class);
   request.addProperty(fromProp);

   PropertyInfo toProp = new PropertyInfo();
   toProp.setName("ToCurrency");
   toProp.setValue("LKR");
   toProp.setType(String.class);
   request.addProperty(toProp);

   SoapSerializationEnvelope envelope = new SoapSerializationEnvelope(
     SoapEnvelope.VER11);
   envelope.dotNet = true;
   envelope.setOutputSoapObject(request);
   HttpTransportSE androidHttpTransport = new HttpTransportSE(URL);

   androidHttpTransport.call(SOAP_ACTION, envelope);
   SoapPrimitive response = (SoapPrimitive) envelope.getResponse();
   String webResponse = response.toString();
   System.out.println(webResponse);
  } catch (XmlPullParserException e) {
   e.printStackTrace();
  } catch (IOException e) {
   e.printStackTrace();
  }
 }
}
} 

In line 36 I have set

envelope.dotNet = true;

For other web services comment that line.