Problems when consuming 3rd party web service

[jylipaa]

Hi

I am having a hard time consuming 3rd party web services with Coldfusion 6.1.

3rd party is providing the web service and the wsdl file goes through validation just fine. Firewalls are open and confirmed and everything should be just fine. But I've ran into java.lang.NullPointerException while trying to invoke the service. I've been trying to invoke with both <cfinvoke> and CreateObject, but cf (or axis) throws and exception. Obviously i cannot cfdump or output any content as the exception is thrown immediately.

I tried to invoke 3rd party's web service with Websphere application studio developer and it's web service browsing tools and I am able to get connected.

It is however possible that there is also something wrong with the webservice itself. Has anyone encountered this nullPointer when working with Web Services and could give something to work around with? Any trouble shooting hints? I've been trying to google it too, but mostly I get into those forums where one asks for help and ten replies that "I've got the same problem!"

[Newsgroup_User]

In article <f9h41t$6hv$1@forums.macromedia.com>
"jylipaa"<webforumsuser@macromedia.com> wrote:
> I am having a hard time consuming 3rd party web services with
> Coldfusion 6.1.

Could you try invoking the web service from a CF7 or CF8 install? The
Web Service engine has been updated quite a lot since 6.1 (which is
four years old!).

Also, if the 3rd party web service URL is public, perhaps you could
post it so we could try it ourselves and help you debug the problem?

Sean Corfield
An Architect's View -- < http://corfield.org/>


--
I'm using an evaluation license of nemo since 65 days.
You should really try it!
http://www.malcom-mac.com/nemo

[jylipaa]

I installed MX7 to my workstation. Production environment is still 6.1 and the customer is not willing to to upgrade. Stuff is also under very strict NDA and web service is not public. Very complicated indeed.

Well, with MX7 I still get error message, a little different though. I'm aware what MX7 has had some issues with web services too - I should install all hotfixes too.

I'll post cleaned up wsdl later. Meanwhile if someone has got the same errors with web services - please tell me how you guys fixed it :)

[rupesh_kumar]

Yeah... you should install the hotfixes as well. If you still get the error, will it be possible for you to post the wsdl?

[usuhamlet_2001]

I am having a similar issue and have not found a fix yet. Most of the posts I have found with similar issues talk about using SSL. I am not currently using SSL (could in the future). Also, there is no firewall on the server itself since this is taken care of at a different level of our network. Anyway, I have chf2070002 as of 3/28/2007 and just found that there was an update to this as of 4/4/2007 but have not been able to install it on our production server yet. I have written a webservice cfc. Any suggestions?

[jylipaa]

Ok, it was the axis that causes problems. One of our java specialists managed to create a working java client, don't know for sure though what framework he was using.

So he did a couple of tests, took tcp dumps and gave me them. Then i tested to send cfhttp posts again with the data received from that dump and it worked.

The architecture is quite bad at the 3rd party server - web service call takes only one parameter - a xml including a lot of request data as string. So I have to send xml-formed request within a xml formed request. I just had to replace <, > and ' with & lt; & gt; & quot; from the inner xml, the string-type parameter and then somehow the server understands coldfusion-sent http posts. The third party also provided a VBScript which worked, so I guess I could have used that also and record some tcp traffic.

adhoc to the rescue 😕