SoapUI comes with extensive support for testing WSDL / SOAP based services;

• Easy import of WSDLs and default request generation allows for ad-hoc testing and exploring of services
• Support for commonly used standards like WS-Security, WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, MTOM, etc allow for testing of advanced services and scenarios
• Integrated WS-I compatibility testing tools allow you to validate both your contracts and messages for industry-standard compliance
• The SOAP Request TestStep allows for extensive functional testing and validation of services through a variety of assertion and scripting possibilities
• Load testing of SOAP/WSDL Services is supported as a natural extension to SoapUI functional tests
• Service Simulations (“MockServices”) can be instantly created from your WSDL and run inside SoapUI for simulating both simple and complex client behavior
• A graphical front end for generating code with the most popular web service development frameworks is provided, allowing you to easily compared frameworks and their artifacts
• All functional test, load tests and MockServices can easily be run both from inside SoapUI and via included command-line tools.
• WSDL Coverage functionality gives you a unique insight into the coverage of your tests in relationship to the tested contracts; have you tested all elements? Attributes? Etc...
• WSDL Refactoring allows you to automatically update your tests and simulations to be compliant with new versions of your WSDLs
• Advanced editors and wizards in SoapUI Pro make testing and exploring of services easy for non-technical users and testers.

What else could you ask for?

Getting Started

Getting started with some ad-hoc testing of SOAP service is straight forward; select the “New Project” option from the File menu, which will prompt as follows:

Paste the WSDL path http://www.webservicex.com/CurrencyConvertor.asmx?wsdl into the Initial WSDL/WADL field (the Project Name will be extracted from this) and press OK. SoapUI will work a bit and create the project with the imported WSDL available in the navigator. Go straight to the first “Request 1” request generated for the Conversion Rate operation and double-click it, which opens the following window:

Now all you have to do is select the desired currencies from the two drop-down options and press the green arrow on the top left to submit the request to the target service, which will return a nice response for you:

If you are using the free version of SoapUI, or have a general preference for XML syntax, you can use the XML view instead for both the request and response (here shown on top of each other):

That’s it, you’ve done your first Ad-Hoc test of a SOAP Web Service, now dive into the details to get to grips with all the possibilities!