Don't forget the content type

In one of our legacy projects all web services were exposed through SAAJ servlets; having to expose a new one we opted for a newer JAX-WS style, also thanks to everything that NetBeans gives you right out of the box.

So we created a new Web Service (you can check this tutorial to see how it is done) and wrote all the tests and code we needed. Everything went fine, until we tried to test the whole project (which should be mandatory before you commit).

At this point some of our old tests failed, all reporting the same error:

SAAJ0532: Absent Content-Type

The offending code builds a message that we use to test the parser:

private SOAPMessage buildMessage(String filename) throws IOException,  SOAPException {
  InputStream resourceAsStream =  this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream(basepath +  filename);
  MessageFactory messageFactory =  MessageFactory.newInstance();
  SOAPMessage message = messageFactory.createMessage(new  MimeHeaders(), resourceAsStream);
  return message;
}

At first it caught me off balance because our additions and changes went nowhere near the code related to the failure. Then it must be something related to the environment, which is the fact that NetBeans added a dependency on the JAX-WS 2.1 library that probably has some conflicts with the SOAP jars we use.

As some manual tests seemed to confirm that the application is working normally, we deferred the investigations (not for very much longer!) and simply fixed the test:

private SOAPMessage buildMessage(String filename) throws IOException,  SOAPException {
  InputStream resourceAsStream =  this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream(basepath +  filename);
  MessageFactory messageFactory =  MessageFactory.newInstance();
  MimeHeaders headers = new  MimeHeaders();
  headers.addHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml");
  SOAPMessage message = messageFactory.createMessage(headers,  resourceAsStream);
  return message;
}

And now an afterthought. The test failed, yet the application did not. Does this mean our test was wrong? Actually it only means that the previous library was more forgiving, because the test has proved useful for a long time (also spotting a regression). It is better to have a not-so-perfect test than none at all.