In this tutorial we are going to build a SOAP client for the popular Confluence Wiki in about five minutes. The client is going to receive rendered HTML Markup from a specified Confluence Page.

Prerequisites

  • A running Confluence Installation with SOAP API enabled – if you don’t already have one  take a look at this article or if you’ve got the Atlassian Plugin SDK installed .. start a standalone instance using atlas-run-standalone ..

  • Maven – never go without it ;)

  • Five minutes of your life time ..

Project Setup / Dependencies

  1. Create a new Maven project:

    mvn archetype:generate ...

  2. Edit the pom.xml and add the dependencies for the axistools plugin – I’m using an older version of axis here because of some Confluence SOAP dialect in some versions ;)

    <dependencies>
	<dependency>
		<groupId>org.apache.axis</groupId>
		<artifactId>axis</artifactId>
		<version>1.4</version>
	</dependency>
	<dependency>
		<groupId>javax.xml</groupId>
		<artifactId>jaxrpc-api</artifactId>
		<version>1.1</version>
	</dependency>
	<dependency>
		<groupId>commons-discovery</groupId>
		<artifactId>commons-discovery</artifactId>
		<version>0.4</version>
	</dependency>
	<dependency>
		<groupId>javax.xml.soap</groupId>
		<artifactId>saaj-api</artifactId>
		<version>1.3</version>
	</dependency>
	<dependency>
		<groupId>axis</groupId>
		<artifactId>axis-wsdl4j</artifactId>
		<version>1.5.1</version>
	</dependency>
</dependencies>

Service Stub and SOAP Client

Now that we’ve got everything we need, we’re ready to create our soap client.

  1. Start your Confluence instance, ensure it is running ..

  2. Change to the Confluence administration console, click “General Configuration” > “Feature Settings” > “Remote API (XML-RPC & SOAP)” and activate this feature

  3. Now you should be able to view the WSDL for Confluence – point your browser to: http://localhost:8080/rpc/soap-axis/confluenceservice-v1?wsdl (newer Confluence versions use: http://localhost:8080/rpc/soap-axis/confluenceservice-v2?wsdl)

  4. Create a directory named wsdl in src/main in the project directory

  5. Save the wsdl file in the created wsdl directory – the axistool plugin searches for wsdl files at this location

  6. Run the following command to create the skeleton files:

    mvn axistools:wsdl2java

  7. Now we got all we need in target/generated-classes

  8. We create a new package named com.hascode.confluence.rpc

  9. In this____package we create a new class named PageReader:

    package com.hascode.confluence.rpc;

import javax.xml.rpc.ServiceException;

import localhost.confluence.rpc.soap_axis.confluenceservice_v2.ConfluenceSoapService;
import localhost.confluence.rpc.soap_axis.confluenceservice_v2.ConfluenceSoapServiceServiceLocator;

import com.atlassian.confluence.rpc.AuthenticationFailedException;
import com.atlassian.confluence.rpc.RemoteException;
import com.atlassian.confluence.rpc.soap.beans.RemotePage;

public class PageReader {
	public static void main(final String[] args)
			throws AuthenticationFailedException, RemoteException,
			java.rmi.RemoteException, ServiceException {
		final ConfluenceSoapService service;
		ConfluenceSoapServiceServiceLocator serviceLocator = new ConfluenceSoapServiceServiceLocator();
		service = serviceLocator.getConfluenceserviceV2();

		// insert your account data here
		String token = service.login("theuser", "thepassword");

		// we are going to fetch a page from the pre-installed Demonstration
		// Space
		RemotePage page = service.getPage(token, "ds", "Tutorial");
		String renderedOutput = service.renderContent(token, "ds",
				page.getId(), page.getContent());
		System.out.println(renderedOutput);
	}
}

  10. Now run the application and enjoy the rendered HTML content of the page “Tutorial” in the “Demonstration Space” ;)

Tutorial Sources

Please feel free to download the tutorial sources from my GitHub repository, fork it there or clone it using Git:

git clone https://github.com/hascode/confluence-soap-client-tutorial.git

Alternatives

There’s also a very nice Maven plugin using wsimport if you dont’t like the axis stuff … in this case, take a look at the jaxws-maven-plugin – there’s also a nice blog article from the Sun guys regarding this plugin.

*update*I just wrote an article about the jaxws-maven plugin – enjoy ! :)

update If you want to know how to write a SOAP component plugin for Confluence – take a look at this article of mine

Resources