Getting the Content of a Message

The initial steps for retrieving a message’s content are the same as those for giving content to a message: Either you use the Message object to get the SOAPBody object, or you access the SOAPBody object through the SOAPPart and SOAPEnvelope objects.

Then you access the SOAPBody object’s SOAPBodyElement object, because that is the element to which content was added in the example. (In a later section you will see how to add content directly to the SOAPPart object, in which case you would not need to access the SOAPBodyElement object to add content or to retrieve it.)

To get the content, which was added with the method SOAPElement.addTextNode, you call the method Node.getValue. Note that getValue returns the value of the immediate child of the element that calls the method. Therefore, in the following code fragment, the getValue method is called on bodyElement, the element on which the addTextNode method was called.

To access bodyElement, you call the getChildElements method on soapBody. Passing bodyName to getChildElements returns a java.util.Iterator object that contains all the child elements identified by the Name object bodyName. You already know that there is only one, so calling the next method on it will return the SOAPBodyElement you want. Note that the Iterator.next method returns a Java Object, so you need to cast the Object it returns to a SOAPBodyElement object before assigning it to the variable bodyElement.

SOAPBody soapBody = response.getSOAPBody();
java.util.Iterator iterator = soapBody.getChildElements(bodyName);
SOAPBodyElement bodyElement = (SOAPBodyElement)iterator.next();
String lastPrice = bodyElement.getValue();
System.out.print("The last price for SUNW is ");

System.out.println(lastPrice);

If more than one element had the name bodyName, you would have to use a while loop using the Iterator.hasNext method to make sure that you got all of them.

while (iterator.hasNext()) {
    SOAPBodyElement bodyElement = (SOAPBodyElement)iterator.next();
    String lastPrice = bodyElement.getValue();
    System.out.print("The last price for SUNW is ");
    System.out.println(lastPrice);
}

At this point, you have seen how to send a very basic request-response message and get the content from the response. The next sections provide more detail on adding content to messages.