How to call a SOAP web service on Android

Android does not provide any sort of SOAP library. You can either write your own, or use something like kSOAP 2. As you note, others have been able to compile and use kSOAP2 in their own projects, but I haven't had to.

Google has shown, to date, little interest in adding a SOAP library to Android. My suspicion for this is that they'd rather support the current trends in Web Services toward REST-based services, and using JSON as a data encapsulation format. Or, using XMPP for messaging. But that is just conjecture.

XML-based web services are a slightly non-trivial task on Android at this time. Not knowing NetBeans, I can't speak to the tools available there, but I agree that a better library should be available. It is possible that the XmlPullParser will save you from using SAX, but I don't know much about that.

org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient comes in the Android SDK by default. That'll get you connected to the WSDL.

HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpContext localContext = new BasicHttpContext();
HttpGet httpGet = new HttpGet("http://www.example.com/" + URL);
HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(httpGet, localContext);

To call a web service from a mobile device (especially on an Android phone), I have used a very simple way to do it. I have not used any web service client API in attempt to call the web service. My approach is as follows to make a call.

1. Create a simple HTTP connection by using the Java standard API HttpURLConnection.
2. Form a SOAP request. (You can make help of SOAPUI to make a SOAP request.)
3. Set doOutPut flag as true.
4. Set HTTP header values like content-length, Content type, and User-agent. Do not forget to set Content-length value as it is a mandatory.
5. Write entire the SOAP request to the output stream.
6. Call the method to make a connection and receive the response (In my case I used getResonseCode).
7. If your received response code as
   200. It means you are succeeded to call web service.
8. Now take an input stream on the same HTTP connection and receive the string object. This string object is a SOAP response.
9. If the response code is other than 200 then take a ErrorInput stream on same HTTPobject and receive the error if any.
10. Parse the received response using SAXParser (in my case) or DOMParaser or any other parsing mechanism.

I have implemented this procedure for the Android phone, and it is successfully running. I am able to parse the response even if it is more than 700 KB.

SOAP is an ill-suited technology for use on Android (or mobile devices in general) because of the processing/parsing overhead that's required. A REST services is a lighter weight solution and that's what I would suggest. Android comes with a SAX parser, and it's fairly trivial to use. If you are absolutely required to handle/parse SOAP on a mobile device then I feel sorry for you, the best advice I can offer is just not to use SOAP.

I had my tryst with KSOAP; I chose a rather simpler approach.

Given a WSDL file, create SOAP Request templates for each Request(for e.g.: using SOAP UI) and then substitute the values to be passed in code. POST this data to the service end point using DefaultHttpClient instance and get the response stream. Parse the Response Stream using an XML Pull parser.

If you can, go for JSON. Android comes with the complete org.json package

I am sure you could make a little SOAP client with Axis. Axis installation instructions.

I think Call SOAP Web Service from Android application will help you a lot.

For me the easiest way is to use good tool to generate all required classes. Personally I use this site:

http://easywsdl.com/

It supports quite complex web services and uses ksoap2.