Is it possible to test stateful web services with SoapUI?

Question

What do you use as a test client for your stateful web services? Is it possible to use SoapUI? Are there best practices in this area?

Answer 1

I don't know whether it's practical to do this with SoapUI, but I've done things like this with both iTKO LISA and Parasoft SOATest. It wasn't for testing stateful web services, but simply executing multiple testing steps, storing results that are used in following steps. Both LISA and SOATest have the ability to define steps in the GUI that can store pieces of responses that are used in later requests.

Answer 2

You can do what's called a "Property Transfer" in SoapUI. For example, all our web services have to first call an authentication web service and obtain an authentication token.

I've set this up in SoapUI so that the returned auth token from the auth service is passed on to subsequent requests. It seems to work pretty well, but unless I'm missing a trick I wouldn't like to set it up for a lot of web services (i.e. you have to have an entry for each call you want to transfer data to / from).

Answer 3

Yeah, building SoapUI tests is slow, repetitive work. We didn't discover it until rewriting the SOAP server, and it makes great unit and system tests, but is s.l.o.w to create them.

Oh, and watch out for the memory leaks. Save very frequently. When you run out of memory, you can't save anymore. That sucks a little.

The property transfer stuff is awesome - you can have different scopes (test, request, global), and you can use GroovyScript to do dynamic stuff (like look up a particular date related to today's date, and so on).

With a properly formatted WSDL file, it will generate template requests for you, but you'll still need to tweak them a fair bit - or at least, I did.