Testing one-way operations which do not return HTTP 202 responses

When you invoke a one-way (in-Only) operation of a web service over HTTP, it responds with HTTP 202 accepted message. Many web service clients such as soapUI or Jmeter waits till they receive a response from the web service.
Waiting for HTTP 202 response is always not desirable since there are situations where you do not even get a 202 response. For example, if you invoke one-way JMS operation, it does not send a reply back to the client.
Look at a scenario similar to the following.

A client sends a message over HTTP to a proxy service in WSO2 ESB. The proxy service places the message in a JMS queue and does not expect a response back. In this case, client does not even get a HTTP 202 response hence it waits and eventually timed out. This prevents you using the tools like soapUI, Apache Jmeter in these scenarios. How can we fix this so that the client always get a HTTP 202 response back?

Let's go through the procedure in detail.

Step 1:

Configure Apache ActiveMQ JMS broker with WSO2 ESB as explained here.

Step 2: 

Create a queue in ActiveMQ. You could access ActiveMQ console application through http://localhost:8161/admin and create a new queue. Name it as "onewaytest".

Step 3: 

Create a simple proxy service in WSO2 ESB as shown below. This proxy service just forwards the incoming SOAP messages into the "onewaytest" JMS queue which we have created in the previous step.

<proxy xmlns="http://ws.apache.org/ns/synapse" name="onewayProxy" transports="http" statistics="disable" trace="disable" startOnLoad="true">
<target>
<inSequence>
<property name="OUT_ONLY" value="true"/>
<send>
<endpoint>
<address uri="jms:/onewaytest?transport.jms.ConnectionFactoryJNDIName=QueueConnectionFactory&java.naming.factory.initial=org.apache.activemq.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory&java.naming.provider.url=tcp://localhost:61616"/>
</endpoint>
</send>
</inSequence>
<outSequence>
<send/>
</outSequence>
</target>
<description></description>
</proxy>

Step 4:

Use soapUI (or SOAP/XML-RPC sampler in Apache Jmeter) and send a SOAP request to the above proxy service. You will get "java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out" in soapUI log. This explains the behavior of HTTP client waiting for HTTP 202 response.

Step 5:

There is an useful property, FORCE_SC_ACCEPTED which can be used inside the inSequence of the proxy service to send HTTP 202 Accepted response back to the client in case of one-way JMS operations.

Add this property to the inSequence of the above proxy service.

<property name="FORCE_SC_ACCEPTED" value="true" scope="axis2" />

Step 6:

Re-send a SOAP message to the proxy service using soapUI. You will get a HTTP 202 response.


HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
Date: Sun, 05 May 2013 07:42:27 GMT
Server: WSO2-PassThrough-HTTP
Transfer-Encoding: chunked