java - JAXWS Soap Handler Large MTOM Attachments

Question

The JAXWS implementation within IBM WebSphere 7 and 8 appears to have some problems when it comes to soap handlers and large MTOM attachments. It appears that the entire message, including all attachment binary content, is read into memory when getMessage() is invoked on the SOAPMessageContext object. This can very easily cause the JVM to run out of available memory.

@Override
public boolean handleMessage(SOAPMessageContext context) {
    SOAPMessage soapMsg = context.getMessage();

    ...
}

In the above code snippet, context.getMessage() can result in out of memory exceptions if the incoming request attachments are larger than the amount of free memory available in the JVM.

How can I get access to the SoapHeader elements without triggering this undesired functionality? I see that the SOAPMessageContext class has a getHeaders(...) method but I'm not sure how to use it exactly. I'm specifically unsure what to pass in for the JAXBContext. Can anybody provide an example or explanation how to use this method?

Here's another related stackoverflow article : JAX-WS SoapHandler with large messages: OutOfMemoryError

Answer 1

Here is how to access the headers without reading the entire message using the WebSphere built-in JAX-WS implementation.

public boolean handleMessage(SOAPMessageContext context) {

    AttributedURI messageIdURI = (AttributedURI)context.get("com.ibm.wsspi.wsaddressing.inbound.MessageID");
    String messageId = "";
    if (messageIdURI != null && messageIdURI.getURI() != null) {
        messageId = messageIdURI.getURI().toString();
    }
    EndpointReference fromApplicationEPR = (EndpointReference)context.get("com.ibm.wsspi.wsaddressing.inbound.FromEPR");
    String fromApplication = "";
    if (fromApplicationEPR != null && fromApplicationEPR.getAddress() != null &&
        fromApplicationEPR.getAddress().getURI() != null) {
        fromApplication = fromApplicationEPR.getAddress().getURI().toString();
    }

    ...

    return true;
}

Note that this differs based on the precise JAX-WS implementation. I'll post how to do this via Apache CXF when I get a chance. Here are the needed imports for the above code:

import com.ibm.ws.wsaddressing.AttributedURI;
import com.ibm.ws.wsaddressing.EndpointReference;