It is very obvious! If you are reading this, you must be knowing how important it is to have an external interface for JIRA and how Atlassian helps by providing a SOAP interface. In an enterprise, or even in small companies for that matter, we often end up integrating JIRA with multiple systems. Creating a SOAP Client is a recommended and easy solution in such scenarios.
In fact, JIRA enables remote access through both SOAP and XML-RPC. SOAP is recommended because it covers more operations!
In fact, JIRA enables remote access through both SOAP and XML-RPC. SOAP is recommended because it covers more operations!
Before you can access JIRA through its SOAP API, you need to enable the JIRA rpc plugin. More on this and the creation of SOAP client can be found in the Atlassian pages. There are few examples as well to get you started.
So how does it all fit together? What are the simple steps to create a SOAP client.
1. Download the latest demo SOAP client distribution from the Atlassian public repository. This contains a Maven 2 project configured to use Apache Axis, and a sample Java SOAP client which creates test issues in http://jira.atlassian.com. You can alternatively download the source code at the end of the tutorial!
2. Modify the 'jira.soapclient.jiraurl' property in your pom.xml to point to your JIRA instance. By default it points to http://jira.atlassian.com
3. You can find the wsdl file under the /src/main/wsdl location. If it is not there or if you want to download the wsdl afresh, run the following command.
So how does it all fit together? What are the simple steps to create a SOAP client.
1. Download the latest demo SOAP client distribution from the Atlassian public repository. This contains a Maven 2 project configured to use Apache Axis, and a sample Java SOAP client which creates test issues in http://jira.atlassian.com. You can alternatively download the source code at the end of the tutorial!
2. Modify the 'jira.soapclient.jiraurl' property in your pom.xml to point to your JIRA instance. By default it points to http://jira.atlassian.com
3. You can find the wsdl file under the /src/main/wsdl location. If it is not there or if you want to download the wsdl afresh, run the following command.
mvn -Pfetch-wsdl -Djira.soapclient.jiraurl=http://{your_jira_instance}/
This will download the wsdl from the configured JIRA instance (as in Step 2) to /src/main/wsdl/. Skip the last property to download the Atlassian JIRA WSDL.
4. Now we have the wsdl ready and it is time to create the client jar. Run the following command to generate the sources from the wsdl and to create the SOAP client.
4. Now we have the wsdl ready and it is time to create the client jar. Run the following command to generate the sources from the wsdl and to create the SOAP client.
mvn -Pbuildclient
This will generate a jar file with all the necessary classes required. There is a second jar file created with the dependencies (axis et. al.) embedded in it. The latter will do a world of good if you are executing it from an environment without axis etc already configured in it.
Let us now look at writing our SOAP program. We are trying the simplest approach , i.e to create the an Eclipse project by running the following.
Let us now look at writing our SOAP program. We are trying the simplest approach , i.e to create the an Eclipse project by running the following.
mvn eclipse:eclipse
You can alternatively try other IDEs or even run from command prompt , whatever is convinient. Let us just look at writing a simple program that just logs into our JIRA instance.
From now on, it is just another webservice invocation! The first step in writing the SOAP client is to get the SOAP service locator. Once you have the locator, get the SOAP service instance from the same by passing a new URL (of your JIRA instance).
From now on, it is just another webservice invocation! The first step in writing the SOAP client is to get the SOAP service locator. Once you have the locator, get the SOAP service instance from the same by passing a new URL (of your JIRA instance).
jiraSoapServiceLocator = new JiraSoapServiceServiceLocator();
jiraSoapService = jiraSoapServiceLocator.getJirasoapserviceV2(new URL(your_url));
Now you can login to JIRA simply by invoking the login operation as follows.
String token = getJiraSoapService().login(your_username, your_password);
The token here is very important as it is used for all the other operations instead of logging in every time. You can see the token as the first argument in all other operations.
Let us just try getting an issue using the key and print its key and id to prove that this stuff works!
Let us just try getting an issue using the key and print its key and id to prove that this stuff works!
RemoteIssue issue = jiraSoapService.getIssue(authToken, ISSUE_KEY);
System.out.println("Retrieved Issue:"+issue.getKey()+" with Id:"+issue.getId());
Hopefully that gives you a fair idea to get started with your first SOAP client! There are lot more you can do with the SOAP client some of which we will explain in our upcoming tutorials. Download some of the examples below. And don't forget to post your comments/feedback!
| jira-soap-client.zip |
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