Logging Messages

CXF uses Java SE Logging for both client- and server-side logging of SOAP requests and responses. Logging is activated by use of separate in/out interceptors that can be attached to the client and/or service as required. These interceptors can be specified either programmatically or via use of configuration files.

For programmatic configuration, the logging interceptors can be added to your service endpoint as follows:

import javax.xml.ws.Endpoint;
import org.apache.cxf.interceptor.LoggingInInterceptor;
import org.apache.cxf.interceptor.LoggingOutInterceptor;
import org.apache.cxf.jaxws.EndpointImpl;

EndpointImpl ep = (EndpointImpl) Endpoint.publish("http://localhost/service", service);

ep.getServer().getEndpoint().getInInterceptors().add(new LoggingInInterceptor());
ep.getServer().getEndpoint().getOutInterceptors().add(new LoggingOutInterceptor());

For client-side logging, the following code snippet can be used as an example:

import org.apache.cxf.endpoint.Client;
import org.apache.cxf.frontend.ClientProxy;
import org.apache.cxf.interceptor.LoggingInInterceptor;
import org.apache.cxf.interceptor.LoggingOutInterceptor;

public class WSClient {
    public static void main (String[] args) {
        MyService ws = new MyService();
        MyPortType port = ws.getPort();
        
        Client client = ClientProxy.getClient(port);
        client.getInInterceptors().add(new LoggingInInterceptor());
        client.getOutInterceptors().add(new LoggingOutInterceptor()); 
        
        // make WS calls...

However, you will probably want to use configuration files for this. They offer two benefits over programmatic configuration:

1. Logging requirements can be altered without needing to recompile the code
2. No Apache CXF-specific APIs need to be added to your code, which helps it remain interoperable with other JAX-WS compliant web service stacks.

Enabling message logging through configuration files is shown here.

Configure logging levels.

In the /etc folder of the CXF distribution there is a sample Java SE logging.properties file you can use to configure logging. For example, if you want to change the console logging level from WARNING to FINE, you need to update two properties in this logging.properties file as below:

.level= FINE
java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.level = FINE

Once this is done, you will need to set the -Djava.util.logging.config.file property to the location of the logging.properties file. As an example, the Ant target below has this property set:

<target name="runClient">
   <java classname="client.WSClient" fork="true">	    	
      <classpath>
         <pathelement location="${build.classes.dir}"/>
         <fileset dir="${env.CXF_HOME}/lib">
            <include name="*.jar"/>
         </fileset>
      </classpath>
      <jvmarg value="-Djava.util.logging.config.file=/usr/myclientapp/logging.properties"/>
   </java>
</target>

Debugging Tools

Tcpmon

TCPMon allows you to easily view messages as they go back and forth on the wire.

WSMonitor

WSMonitor has slightly more functionality than Tcpmon. Information on how to reconfigure clients to work with WSMonitor is available in this blog entry.

SOAP UI

SOAP UI can also be used for debugging. In addition to viewing messages, it allows you send messages and load test your services. It also has plugins for Eclipse, IDEA and NetBeans.

Wireshark

Wireshark, a network packet analyzer, can be helpful in case you are getting cryptic WstxUnexpectedCharException errors from CXF's Woodstox StAX processor. This error can indicate a non-XML response from the server (e.g., an HTML error message) that Woodstox can't process. In these cases, Wireshark can help with troubleshooting by providing you the non-XML response data. See this blog entry for more information.