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Getting Started with soapUI

Below you'll find a step-by-step guide to creating your first soapUI project with some 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, port types), 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

You can find most specifications at W3C and tutorials at several sites, for example W3Schools and zvon.org.

Install/Run soapUI

Install/Run soapUI in one of the following ways:

  • By launching the latest version with Java WebStart from this sites top page
  • By downloading and installing soapUI using the windows installer from SourceForge, which includes the required 1.5 JRE (Java Runtime Environment). Use the installer if you are unsure about your systems Java installation and/or if you want startup-menu icons and an uninstaller.
  • By downloading the binary distribution from SourceForge (for example "soapui-1.5-bin.zip") and unzipping it manually and running the included bin\soapui.bat (or .sh) script (you will need Java in your path).

In any case, soapUI should start and display an empty workspace to get started with.

Create/Import 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

If you have downloaded the offline version, a sample project is included in the root folder; select "Import Project" instead and browse to the sample-soapui-project.xml file.

Read more about projects in the User Guide

Add a Web Service 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 Web Service 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 (see image below)
  • 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


Next: Getting Started with Functional Testing