Getting Raw XML From SOAPMessage in Java

If you have a SOAPMessage or SOAPMessageContext, you can use a Transformer, by converting it to a Source via DOMSource:

            final SOAPMessage message = messageContext.getMessage();
            final StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();

            try {
                TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer().transform(
                    new DOMSource(message.getSOAPPart()),
                    new StreamResult(sw));
            } catch (TransformerException e) {
                throw new RuntimeException(e);
            }

            // Now you have the XML as a String:
            System.out.println(sw.toString());

This will take the encoding into account, so your "special characters" won't get mangled.

You could try in this way.

SOAPMessage msg = messageContext.getMessage();
ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
msg.writeTo(out);
String strMsg = new String(out.toByteArray());

It turns out that one can get the raw XML by using Provider<Source>, in this way:

import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import javax.xml.transform.Source;
import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;
import javax.xml.ws.Provider;
import javax.xml.ws.Service;
import javax.xml.ws.ServiceMode;
import javax.xml.ws.WebServiceProvider;

@ServiceMode(value=Service.Mode.PAYLOAD)
@WebServiceProvider()
public class SoapProvider implements Provider<Source>
{
    public Source invoke(Source msg)
    {
        StreamResult sr = new StreamResult();

        ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        sr.setOutputStream(out);

        try {
            Transformer trans = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
            trans.transform(msg, sr);

            // Use out to your heart's desire.
        }
        catch (TransformerException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }    

        return msg;
    }
}

I've ended up not needing this solution, so I haven't actually tried this code myself - it might need some tweaking to get right. But I know this is the right path to go down to get the raw XML from a web service.

(I'm not sure how to make this work if you absolutely must have a SOAPMessage object, but then again, if you're going to be handling the raw XML anyways, why would you use a higher-level object?)