Service Archive Generator Wizard - Eclipse Plug-in

Introduction

As part of the Axis2 tool set, the service archive generator is an important tool that allows the generation of service archives.This document explains the usage of the archive generator plug-in. The full documentation that includes the installation is avaialble at the Axis2 web site

Operation

If the plug-in is properly installed you should see a new wizard under the "New" section.(use the File -> New -> Other or Ctrl + N )

Selecting the wizard and pressing the next button will start the service generator wizard. Following is the first wizard page.

Once the class file folder  is given (which should be a folder in the file system) the next button will be enabled. Page 2 of the wizard requires you to locate the wsdl file. Note that the WSDL file cannot be skipped in this version of the tool

Select the service.XML file in the next wizard page

Note that The service XML file can be generated if needed. To proceed to the service generaion page, check the "generate automatically" checkbox.

If the automatic mode is not selected then the wizard will directly jump to the library selection page. However if the automatic mode is selected the wizard will show the following page

This is a somewhat complicated page. The service name textbox should include the name of the service that you wish to give this service. For the implementation class type in the fully qualified class name and hit the load button to view the operations

The loaded operations should be displayed in a table. Once this is displayed you can filter the methods by selecting/deselcting the methods using the checkbox at each row.

Further filtering can be achieved by using the "search declared methods" only checkbox

Once the method selection is complete the wizard has enough information to generate a basic services.xml file. If further customization is required, there's no choice but to manually edit it!

The next step is to add the libraries. The library addition page looks like this

The library name (with full path) can be either typed on the text box or browsed for using the browse button.

Hit the Add button to add the library to the list. The added libraries should be displayed in the list box

If any library needs to be removed, highlight it in the list and hit remove. Click next to proceed to the last page of the wizard

The last page of the wizard asks for the output location and the output archive name.

Once all the parameters are filled, hit the finish button to complete the wizard and generate the service archive.

If you see the above message, then you've successfully generated the service archive! This service archive can be hot deployed to the axis2

Appendix