Manipulate soap message as a string

Question

Is it possible to manipulate a SOAP message generated by Jax-WS as a String before sending it to the server? I would like to intercept the message exactly before it's going to be sent and modify some tags.

I want to do this because I need to send a SOAP request to the server. A tag of this request has a lot of xml documents as its content. For each document I need to redeclare the namespace in some tags (Jax-WS intelligently declare it just once). I can't use any prefixes. I need to sign the xml too. All these problems would be easier to solve if I could manipulate the message as a string.

I've seen something similar with axis, but I didn't find out how to do this with Jax-WS.

Thank you.

Update: I already have tried to use handlers (both SOAP and Logical handlers). My problem is that the message is changed by Jax-WS even after I modify it with the handlers. The body of my soap message needs to look like this:

<soap12:Body>
  <cteDadosMsg xmlns="http://www.portalfiscal.inf.br/cte/wsdl/CteRecepcao">
      <enviCTe xmlns="http://www.portalfiscal.inf.br/cte" versao="1.04">
         <idLote>1</idLote>
         <CTe  xmlns="http://www.portalfiscal.inf.br/cte">
         </CTe>
         <CTe  xmlns="http://www.portalfiscal.inf.br/cte">
         </CTe>
      </enviCTe>
   </cteDadosMsg>
</soap12:Body>

Look that my CTe tags need to repeat the namespace declaration (the same used by enviCTe). I tried to do the following steps:

1) Created the document containing the enviCTe using Jaxb.

2) Converted it to string and adjusted the namespace declaration of the CTe tags (using String.replace).

3) Added the xml string to the cteDadosMsg. Jax-WS escapes the characters (replacing < for < for example). The web service does not understand the xml with the escaped characters.

4) Added a LogicalHandler for unescaping the payload (replacing < for < and so on).

5) After doing this, Jax-WS adjusts the namespace declaration again and the xmlns attribute of my CTe tags disappear. :P That's my problem. Jax-WS "fix" the message even after modifying it with the handlers.

Instead of adding the xml generated by Jaxb as a string, I also tried to add it as a Document. I don't have the problems with escaping, but I still can't repeat the namespace declaration for every CTe tag. When I solve this, I still will have to sign some tags of the xml. So I really would like to intercept the message just before it is sent and modify it as a string. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

You can do the same using Handlers. Refer here for more details.