Creating a web service with complex types

Question

I'm new to web services and I created a basic project in eclipse with one exposed method. I was able to deploy my webservice and it works fine. The code is below.

import javax.jws.WebMethod;
import javax.jws.WebParam;
import javax.jws.WebService;

@WebService(targetNamespace="http://test.com", name="testService")
public class WebService {
    @WebMethod(operationName="start")
    public String start(@WebParam(name="inputParameter") String inputParameter) {
        return startMethod(inputParameter);
    }
}

My question is how do I set up this method to deal with complex types. I want to receive a number of parameters, but I don't want to just receive them as a bunch of strings. I was thinking of having some sort of wrapper object that contained all the parameters I need for my method. Any advice on how to do this? Do I need additional annotations to create the WSDL? Thanks!

Answer 1

JAX-WS is based on JAXB so you can pass only JAXB supported types as a web method parameters. So any user defined class properly annotated such as mentioned below can be used as parameter or return type of any WebMethod

@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD)
@XmlType(name = "Person")
public class Person {    
    @XmlElement(name = "firstName")
    protected String firstName;    
    @XmlElement(name = "lastName")
    protected String lastName;

    public String getFirstName() {
        return firstName;
    }

    public void setFirstName(String value) {
        this.firstName = value;
    }

    public String getLastName() {
        return lastName;
    }

    public void setLastName(String value) {
        this.lastName = value;
    }
}