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MickH's avatar
MickH
New Contributor
6 years ago

Cannot Create new SoapUI Project from a wsdl that binds ok in CICS WS on mainframe

I'm trying to create a new SoapUI project from a wsdl and xsd that bind ok on mainframe to create a CICS WebService so cannot imagine any syntax error or the like. Please note I've tried this in Soa...
  • richie's avatar
    richie
    6 years ago
    Hey MickH,

    Yeah, my immediate thought was that the file was malformed (so wont open in a browser or anything with an xml parser), but the error message indicates different.

    Did i understand correctly....the .xsd is embedded in the .wsdl?

    In that case if you open the .wsdl in any text editor (if youve got xmlspy thats even better as it has an xmlparser included) and search for the ampersand character.

    There should be an entity placeholder that isnt one of the five allowed entities (& or > or
    &lt; or &apos; or &quot; which corresponds to & or > or < or ' or ")

    There should be another entity value starting with the ampersand character (i.e. '&') that isn't one of the five allowed. That'll be the problem and you need to encode or remove.

    Nice one,

    Rich
  • MickH's avatar
    MickH
    6 years ago

    Many thanks for all your responses on this subject, particularly Rich. I'm going to mark this as solved, despite the problem still existing. What I did for a workaround was port the xsd & wsdl back to my C: drive, changed the encoding back to UTF and the pathnames to C: and offered that to SoapUI. Of course it worked and so I can progress with a litlle testing.

    For now the character set translation problem remains unsolved for this particular wsdl, but I do think it is a SoapUI problem given the EBCDIC version binds perfectly in CICS.

    Thanks again.

richie's avatar
richie
Community Hero
Hey MickH,

It's been about 5 years since i last came across a mainframe and EBCDIC, so you'll have to bare with me, but i'm guessing that's where the problem lies.

I'm also a bit lost at the method of soapui project you're using. Its been a number of years since i was proficient with soapui (i've been using ReadyAPI! for the last 4 years or so), but when i create a project via a .wsdl, i create the project by loading in the .wsdl. Does soapui support this method of project creation? I can't remember. Either way that doesn't really matter cos you've used the method you're using before.

Anyway. Going back to my original thought. If you're 100% positive the error response is a bit of a red herring and you don't have any undefined entities, if i understand your process I'm wondering if your project is being created with the .xml default of UTF-8, but your .wsdl has EBCDIC chars that aren't recognised by UTF-8 and this is what the problem is?

I'm typing this out on my phone so can't really do much but i'd do a comparison of UTF-8 vs EBCDIC-CP-US charsets and go from there.
I'd also investigate if you can load in the EBCDIC-CP-US charset into soapui. I know you can load other language charsets into ReadyAPI! cos i've seen posts from people that were testing using Chinese ideographs (or whatever the correct phrase is). Perhaps if you can add the EBCDIC charset into soapui, could could then specify the EBCDIC charset in your soapuisettings.xml (or wherever the current charset is stored) which might allow you to create a project .xml with EBCDIC rather than UTF-8

I need to highlight that the above are just ramblings on my part and i don't know for sure if this is the answer, but i'm almost certain (with the current info i have and without access to your system) the EBCDIC .wsdl vs a UTF-8 project is the problem.

Hope this helps!

Rich
MickH's avatar
MickH
New Contributor
6 years ago

Many thanks for all your responses on this subject, particularly Rich. I'm going to mark this as solved, despite the problem still existing. What I did for a workaround was port the xsd & wsdl back to my C: drive, changed the encoding back to UTF and the pathnames to C: and offered that to SoapUI. Of course it worked and so I can progress with a litlle testing.

For now the character set translation problem remains unsolved for this particular wsdl, but I do think it is a SoapUI problem given the EBCDIC version binds perfectly in CICS.

Thanks again.