How to print a formatted SOAPMessage?

Question

I have a SOAPMessage (found in javax.xml.soap.SOAPMessage).

However the only way to print it seems to be soapMessage.writeTo(System.out); However this doesn't have any new lines and with a large SOAPMessage it can be difficult to read.

Further, using System.out.println(soapMessage.toString()); just prints out:

com.sun.xml.internal.messaging.saaj.soap.ver1_1.Message1_1Impl@76c7e77a

I looked at How to pretty print XML from Java?, How to print SOAPMessage and How to convert SOAPBody to String but neither fix the issue of newlines and/or formatting a SOAPMessage.

Answer 1

If you don't mind adding additional dependencies to your project then jdom provides good formatted output for XML.

The documentation at jdom.org is well worth a look.

It's a little convoluted but you can write the XML in to a JDOM Document object and then use the XMLOutputter object to print it in a pretty format.:

    // write the SoapMessage to a String called xml
    File file= new File(pathToFile);
    file.createNewFile();
    FileOutputStream fileOutputStream = new FileOutputStream(file);
    soapMessage.writeTo(fileOutputStream);
    fileOutputStream.flush();
    fileOutputStream.close();
    SAXBuilder b = new SAXBuilder();
    Document doc = b.build(file);
    XMLOutputter xmlOutputter = new XMLOutputter(Format.getPrettyFormat());
    xmlOutputter.output(doc, System.out);