WSO2 XML Declaration - wso2

Question

I'm using WSO2 ESB 4.0.3 to deploy a simple service. I have a service returning the following XML:
<Employees>
<Employee>
<EmployeeID>JOHNDOE1</EmployeeID>
<FirstName>JOHN</FirstName>
<LastName>DOE</LastName>
</Employee>
<Status>1</Status>
</Employees>
The problem I'm having is that there is no XML declaration. Is there a setting that will return the response with the XML declaration included, or do I need to use the ESB response to add it? I was hoping for something like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Employees>
<Employee>
<EmployeeID>JOHNDOE1</EmployeeID>
<FirstName>JOHN</FirstName>
<LastName>DOE</LastName>
</Employee>
<Status>1</Status>
</Employees>
Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

This is an old question, but seeing as I ran into the same thing just now I'll post my solution.
I needed to have a proxy service return a plain XML message without the enclosing soap envelope. I tried using application/xml and text/xml (org.apache.axis2.transport.http.ApplicationXMLFormatter and org.wso2.carbon.relay.ExpandingMessageFormatter respectively) content types to no avail. Neither of these content types returned the message with the XML declaration.
The solution is to write a custom message formatter. Here's my implementation that behaves like org.apache.axis2.transport.http.ApplicationXMLFormatter but properly writes the XML declaration to the message.
package com.example.axis2.messageformatter;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import org.apache.axiom.om.OMOutputFormat;
import org.apache.axis2.AxisFault;
import org.apache.axis2.context.MessageContext;
import org.apache.axis2.transport.http.ApplicationXMLFormatter;
public class CustomApplicationXmlFormatter extends ApplicationXMLFormatter {
#Override
public void writeTo(MessageContext context, OMOutputFormat format, OutputStream out, boolean preserve) throws AxisFault {
String xmlHeader = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"" + format.getCharSetEncoding() + "\"?>";
try {
out.write(xmlHeader.getBytes());
} catch (IOException e) {
throw new AxisFault("Unable to write XML declaration to output stream.", e);
}
super.writeTo(context, format, out, preserve);
}
}
You can drop the class in a jar file to <ESB_ROOT>/repository/components/lib.
Additionally you need to refer to the class from the axis2 config (<ESB_ROOT>/repository/conf/axis2/axis2.xml) by adding the following into the message formatters portion of the file:
<messageFormatter contentType="application/xml" class="com.example.axis2.messageformatter.CustomApplicationXmlFormatter"/>

Answer 2

As Kallja answered before - messageFormatter should be fixed.
I've implemented his fix as a maven-based project - available here: https://github.com/akakunin/custom-appxml-message-formatter
I've tested it with WSO2 EI 6.0.0 - it works fine for me.

Answer 3

Just putting this here in case someone else stumbles upon the same issue, WSO2 now support this OOTB with the following axis2 property
<property name="WRITE_XML_DECLARATION" scope="axis2" value="true"/>
source for this - https://github.com/wso2/wso2-axis2/blob/master/modules/kernel/src/org/apache/axis2/transport/http/ApplicationXMLFormatter.java#L53

Answer 4

How you captured SOAP message? You can use Tcpmon or just add a log mediator with log level full to observe the complete the complete message. I assume you what you have observed is SOAP body. You do not need to add xml declaration etc. manually.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<soap:Envelope
xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-envelope"
soap:encodingStyle="http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-encoding">
<soap:Body xmlns:m="http://www.example.org/stock">
<m:GetStockPriceResponse>
<m:Price>34.5</m:Price>
</m:GetStockPriceResponse>
</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>