18 November 2008 - 2.5 |
Although soapUI should be easy to get started with, you should have a good grasp of the following concepts and technologies to get the most out of soapUI's functionality.
You can find most specifications at W3C and tutorials at several sites, for example W3Schools and zvon.org.
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soapUI is a standard desktop application adhering to established User Interface concepts for Integrated Development Environments, as available in for example Eclipse, NetBeans and IDEA. Most actions have keyboard shortcuts and tooltips, you should have no problems finding your way around. soapUI makes heavy use of "Inspectors"; i.e. tabs that can be shown and hidden by selecting them.
The soapUI window is divided into the following views:
left The main navigator showing a hierarchy of all projects, interfaces, etc. (see below)
| right The soapUI desktop containing editors and viewers for those double clicked items in the navigator.
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bottom-left
| bottom right A color coded log view showing log messages from soapUI |
You can set a centered background image for the default desktop by placing a soapui-backgroung.gif/jpg/png file in the soapUI bin folder when using the default desktop
The following objects are currently shown in the navigator tree:
Project node(s) : for each project in the workspace
Interface/Service node(s) : for each WSDL Interface or REST Service in the project
Operation/Resource node(s) : for each WSDL Operation or REST Resource in the containting Interface/Service
Request node(s) : for each WSDL or REST Request created for the containing Operation or Resource
REST Resource node(s) : for each child REST Resource
TestSuite node(s) : for each TestSuite in the project
TestCase node(s) : for each TestCase in the testsuite
MockService node(s) : for each MockService in the project
MockOperation node(s) : for each MockOperation in the MockService
MockResponse node(s) : for each MockResponse in the containing MockOperation
The Navigator described above contains a small toggle button on top of the tree. Pressing it will
put the Navigator into Property Mode, displaying all Properties for their
corresponding objects in the tree (green = read/write, black = read-only), giving an overview of all
defined or available properties within a project.
One of the main Use cases for this mode is the possibility to drag a property from the tree into any text editor that supports Property Expansion, making it extremely easy to create property expansions as desired. If the property being dragged contains an XML value, the XPath Selector will be displayed after a drop, allowing for further property-expansion refinement | ![]() |
soapUI provides extensive support for dragging and dropping items in the Navigator, resulting in corresponding Clone or Move operations, alternatively add or import actions, for example dragging a Request to a TestCase creates a TestRequest Step corresponding to the dragged Request. It is also possible to drag and drop within or between the TestSuite and TestCase editors and the Navigator to rearrange, move, or copy items.
Most actions in soapUI are performed through toolbar buttons or context sensitive right-button menus. The following actions are available from the main menu:
File Menu
The first 9 actions are the same as those for the Workspace popup menu, please go to the Workspaces page for details. After these come the following actions:
Tools Menu
Desktop Menu - Shows actions related to the currently selected Desktop.
Help Menu - general information and soapUI Pro specific actions
The System Properties option from the help menu opens a simple dialog showing all current defined system properties, which can be useful for debugging system or security settings, etc?
The bottom right of the soapUI workspace contains a number of log windows, each displaying corresponding output;
Right clicking on a log will show a popup menu with options to clear and enable or disable the log and to copy selected rows to the clipboard. Also, log-entries can be selected or copied to the clipboard for transfer to external tools. An option to set the maximum number of rows is available (default is 1000), when exceeding this limit, old rows are removed from the log (i.e. fifo).
The following tabs are currently displayed (when needed):
soapUI uses log4j for logging, you can customize the log4j configuration by putting a log4j xml configuration file named "soapui-log4j.xml" in the soapUI bin directory (or the current working directory when not running from there).