Getting Started

Below you'll find a step-by-step guide to creating your first soapui project with som requests and a testcase. The sample will use the amazon.com web-service

Although soapui should be easy to get started with, you will need to have a good grasp of the following concepts/technologies to get the most out of soapui's functionality.

  • WSDL - basic concepts (services, ports, bindings, porttypes), relation to xml-schema
  • SOAP - basic concepts, relation to WSDL (bindings, etc), different encoding types (soap-encoded/literal) and message styles (document/rpc)
  • XML and related technologies - XPath, XML Schema, namespaces, etc

Install/Run soapui

Begin by either launching the latest version with Java WebStart (recommended!), or downloading the latest release from sourceforge and running it manually and running the included run.bat/run.sh script. In either case, soapui should start and display an empty workspace to get started with.

Create a project

Now that you're up and running, get going by creating your first project.

  • Right click on the workspace node in the left navigation pane and select "New WSDL Project"
  • You will be prompted for a project name and then for a local file where the project should be saved
  • If all is ok an empty project will be created in the workspace

Read more about projects in the User Guide

Add a webservice to the project

Now that you have a project you can start adding Interfaces (=WebService PortTypes) to it.

  • Right click on the project node and select "Add WSDL from URL"
  • You will be prompted for the url to the Interfaces WSDL; enter http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/AWSECommerceService.wsdl to add the amazon web service and select "Ok".
  • soapui will prompt you if you want to create default requests for each operation, simply select "Yes"
  • soapui will now add the SOAP/Http Binding for the amazon "AWSECommerceServicePortType" PortType to your project and create nodes for each operation.

Read more about interfaces in the User Guide

Try some requests

Now that you have added the amazon webservice you can start playing around with some requests. When you added the interface in the previous step soapui created default requests for each operation in accordance with their WSDL/Schema definition.

  • Expand the Interface node and any Operation node under it, you should see the created "Request 1".
  • Double-click the request node to open the request editor in the right part of soapui
  • The request editor is divided into 3 parts:
    • A toolbar at the top with a number of request-related actions/options
    • A request area to the left
    • A response area to the right
  • The default request created by soapui will have "?" for each value that needs to be supplied in the request, replace/remove any values as required and post request by pressing the left-most toolbar button (a green arrow)
  • The request will run in the background and its response will be displayed in the right editor

Read more about working with requests in the User Guide

Create a TestCase from some request

Once you have some requests working as you want, you can create a testcase that verifies their behaviour

  • Select the second toolbar button in the request editor window ("Add this request to a test-case").
  • If there are no testsuites/testcases in your project, soapui will prompt you for names of these, start out by specifying something like "Amazon TestSuite" and "Amazon TestCase"
  • soapui will prompt you for the name of your test request, call it "Step 1"
  • Corresponding testsuite/testcases will be created and the request will be added as a Test-Request which is a copy of the original request (so you can keep playing with that without changing the test request)
  • A test-request-editor almost identical to the previous request-editor will be opened with your new test request; it differs by adding assertions functionality

Read more about testsuites/testcases in the User Guide

Add Assertions

Now that you have your first test-request you should add some assertions to verify that it works correctly

  • Select the second toolbar button in the request editor window ("Add an assertion to this test-request").
  • Start by adding a "Schema Compliance" assertion, this will check that the response is compliant with the associated WSDL/Schema definition.
  • Post the request with the green submit-button, soapui will run the request and validate the response. If all goes well the test-request should be shown with a green background in the navigation tree

Read more about assertions in the User Guide

Run your test!

Once you have all the test- request and their assertions you want you can run the entire testcase

  • Double-click on the test-case node in the left navigation pane, this will open the test-case runner.
  • Run all tests by selecting the green-arrow button labeled "Run this testcase", soapui will submit each test-request and validate accordingly, the results will be displayed during the execution.