15+ SoapUI Tutorials: The Best Web Services API Testing Tool

In this article, we have compiled a list of Soap UI Tutorials for the benefit of our readers. Let’s get started.

STH is coming up with another testing tool tutorial. You know how detailed and useful these tutorials are. The tools are SoapUI and SoapUI Pro.

We suggest that our readers should start learning SoapUI – the most used web service API testing tool.

Since this is a highly technical and specialized form of testing we are talking about, it is important that we lay some groundwork that will lead the way to easily mastering the concepts.

SoapUI Tutorials

Here is what you will learn from this comprehensive SoapUI Tutorial series

SoapUI Tutorials

• Tutorial #1: Understanding Web services (must read)
• Tutorial #2: Features of SoapUI & SoapUI Pro
• Tutorial #3: Installation of SoapUI and SoapUI Pro
• Tutorial #4: Working with Projects (must read)
• Tutorial #5: Understanding Assertions in SOAPUI
• Tutorial #6: Working with Operators
• Tutorial #7: Dealing Properties with Groovy Script (must read)
• Tutorial #8: Working with Properties
• Tutorial #9: Conditional Statements in Groovy
• Tutorial #10: Object Oriented Concepts
• Tutorial #11: Exception Handling in Groovy

SoapUI Pro Tutorials

=> First get and install pro version from here.

• Tutorial #12: Introducing SoapUI Pro (must read)
• Tutorial #13: Understanding REST and SOAP Services (must read)
• Tutorial #14: Understanding Data Driven Testing
• Tutorial #15: Storing Request and Response in a File (must read)
• Tutorial #16: SoapUI Interview Questions and Answers

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In this tutorial, we are going to discuss web services in detail.

Nowadays web services play a major role in Internet applications. Let us now take some time for a brief introduction of the web services. For enhanced expertise in web services knowing HTML and XML mark up languages is important as the Web Services are created and implemented with via these languages.

What are Web Services?

Web services are web components that transfer data between client and server. The client sends a web request to the server and the server then responds to the client. This response will differ based on the web service request type.

Web services in SoapUI

SoapUI is designed for validating web services easily.

Let’s look at an example: A flight ticker booking application that runs in City 1 and is being accessed from City 2 to book a ticket. A user enters all the information such as boarding point, destination point, date of journey etc, and then as soon as the “Book Now” button is clicked, the web service from City 1 gets invoked and it passes all the information that is entered to the application server that processes the user request. The Reservation application will then send a response to the User’s request.

Most online payment transactions are processed through web services only because of the enhanced security this method offers. An input parameter will be sent to the payment gateway website and which will be processed subsequently. An acknowledgement will be sent to the client regarding the payment status finally.

All these activities can be seen through SoapUI request and response screens. SoapUI helps us to evaluate these web services.

Now let’s see the important components of the web services. They are,

• WSDL – Web Service Description Language
• SOAP – Simple Object Access Protocol
• UDDI – Universal Description, Discovery and Integration
• RDF – Resource Description Framework

#1. WSDL (Web Services Description Language)

A WSDL is a document that should be written using XML. This document describes the following details about the web service:

• Origin of the web service
• Header information
• Port type
• Input and output messages

Each of the above information is represented as a tag in the WSDL file, such as:

1. <types> – XML Schema data types
2. <message> – the actual request and response data being communicated
3. <portType> – the target/end points where the actual web service is hosted to perform the operation
4. <binding>– the protocol information is given for the data format
5. <definitions>– the parent tag for the above-mentioned tags

Now let’s look at the sample WSDL file

Your WSDL file should follow the W3C standard as stated above. Through web services, we can convert into a web based application. Web services are constructed on top of XML, HTTP, TCP / IP, Java, HTML and so on. Since web services are XML based language, we can have these applications as local, distributed and web-based environments.

Role of WSDL

Validating web services using SoapUI is easy and is only possible with WSDL document because to configure web services in SoapUI, WSDL document is mandatory. If the WSDL document is not valid, SoapUI will throw an exception immediately. Now let us look at the UDDI component.

#2. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration)

This is a global repository where we can search for web services spread across the globe. To get or search for web services just visit http://uddi.xml.org/ website. Here you can also register your own web service and make it available to global users.

UDDI is the place where the WSDL is described in detail. This will be communicated through the SOAP protocol which will be explored later in this tutorial. Say, for example, if you wish to advertise your products to global customers you could create a web service and host it through UDDI. This can now be accessed by global users and from there the business can be established.

#3. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)

Generally, it uses XML based data to interact with web applications.

Here are a few points to remember

• SOAP is language and platform independent as it is written by using XML.
• It creates a platform to communicate with applications that are running in different operating systems using different technologies.
• Most of the Internet applications interact with each other over Remote Procedure Calls that use DCOM (Distributed Component) and CORBA (Common Broker Architecture)
• These technologies are different than the HTTP.

RPC (Remote procedure calls) are sometimes blocked by firewalls and proxy servers. To overcome these issues, SOAP was designed. There are some standard rules to be followed while building SOAP requests.

Let’s take a look at the sample SOAP document.

As you can see, a SOAP document must contain the following elements:

1. Envelope element is the topmost tag which identifies the XML document as a SOAP message.
2. Followed by the Envelope element, you will see the header element that has the header information.
3. The Body element specifies the call and response information.
4. Finally, you have the Fault element which contains errors and status information.

The above said elements should be declared with the default namespace for the SOAP envelope.

Generally, a protocol is a set of standard rules that transfer the data between two regions on the Internet over the web services. There are many protocols that are used in Internet applications. They are Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which serves as a packet between two connections. Internet Protocol (IP) that sends and receives messages between two destinations.

Let us look at some other important protocols

• Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
• Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and
• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)

These protocols are used according to the requirements.

#4. RDF (Resource Description Framework)

RDF contains a description of the web resources such as title, author, content, and copyright information. This framework was designed so that computers can be read and understood easily by the web.

RDF is completely written by using XML language.

RDF data can be transferred between different types of computers using different operating systems and programming languages. Generally, RDF uses Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) on the web and it describes the resources along with the property and property values.

Take a look at the sample RDF document for better understanding:

<? xml version="1.0"?>
<RDF>
  <Description about="https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/rdf">
    <author> Wilfred R. Myers </author>
    <homepage>http://www. softwaretestinghelp.com</homepage>
  </Description>
</RDF>

What is XML

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a markup language that is used for storing, sharing and formatting data. In general, an XML document is built by the tags. Let us see the sample XML content for a user’s personal information.

<Firstname> Joel </Firstname>
<Lastname> King </Lastname>
<Address> 1432 Valley Drive </Address>
<City> New York </City>
<Country> United States </Country>
<Zipcode> 19714 </Zipcode>

Meaning of “eXtensible” and “Markup”:

In the above sample, First name, Last name, Address etc. are enclosed by less than (<) and greater than (>) symbols. These labels are known as tags and the one with the forward slash (/) along with the text, that is called closing tag. Tags are also called mark-ups. These can be customized as needed. This customization is not possible in other markup languages like SGML, HTML and so on. This is why XML is an extensible language.

XML focuses on the data for storing, sharing and exchanging as required, and HTML deals with the format of the data like applying colours, adding images, changing fonts, styles and so on.

XML and HTML can be used together in applications. For example, if you take a book, there will be textual data and graphical representation formatted. Hypothetically, XML can handle storing actual data and HTML applies the format for the content. Thereby the textbook could have information as well as attractive images and colours.

How does XML work with SoapUI?

As XML is a common language on the Internet, it can be integrated with SoapUI because web services are mostly written in the form of XML. Also, if we pass XML input parameter to the web service, the response itself will be in the form of XML. SOAPUI can configure these web services

Conclusion

So far in this tutorial, we have taken a look at the following:

• Web services and its several components like WSDL, UDDI, RDF SOAP
• Importance of WSDL document and its body of content
• XML and its usages in SoapUI

Next tutorial => In the next tutorial, we will learn the features of SoapUI and SoapUI Pro version in detail.

Feel free to post all your queries about web services and the SoapUI tool in the comments section. We will answer all these questions in the upcoming tutorials. 

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Here is the list again.

List of SoapUI and SoapUI Pro Tutorials

SoapUI Free Version Tutorials:

Tutorial #1. Understanding Web services
– What are Webservices?
– What is the role of WSDL in SoapUI?
– Understanding XML

Tutorial #2. Features of SoapUI & SoapUI Pro
– SoapUI
– SoapUI Pro

Tutorial #3. Installation of SoapUI and SoapUI Pro

Tutorial #4. Working with Projects
– Creating Projects in SoapUI
– Adding Testsuite, Testcase and Test step
– Cloning Objects of Project
– Renaming and Deleting Project Elements

Tutorial #5. Understanding Assertions in SOAPUI
– Brief Introduction of Assertions
– Contains and Not Contains Assertions
– XPath Assertions
– XQuery Assertions

Tutorial #6. Working with Operators
– Glance At Groovy Scripting
– Working with Arithmetic Operations
– Understanding Unary Operators
– Using Assignment Operators

Tutorial #7. Dealing Properties with Groovy Script
– Assigning Data to Properties
– Accessing Test Results From Properties
– Understanding Property Test Step

Tutorial #8. Working with Properties
– Different Faces of Properties
– Integrating Properties in Service Request
– Understanding Property Transfer Test step
– Load Properties Externally

Tutorial #9. Conditional Statements in Groovy
– Boolean Statements
– Iteration Statements
– Arrays in Groovy

Tutorial #10. Object Oriented Concepts
– Basic Introduction of OOP
– Methods with Global Properties
– Methods with ‘Return’ keyword
– Methods with Arrays

Tutorial #11. Exception Handling in Groovy
– Brief Introduction of Exception and Its Types
– Importance of Exception Handling in SoapUI
– Explaining Exception Handling with Example

SoapUI Pro Tutorials

This is a powerful next generation of SoapUI version with many core functionalities.

=> Before going into more details about these SoapUI pro tutorials, I suggest to install the SoapUI Pro version from here.

Tutorial #12. Introducing SoapUI Pro

Tutorial #13. Understanding REST and SOAP Services

Tutorial #14. Understanding Data Driven Testing
– Understanding Data Driven Testing
– Brief introduction of data driven testing and types
– Datasource and Datasource loop test steps
– Storing and Reading From XLS and XML

Tutorial #15. Storing Request and Response in a File

Tutorial #16. Top 30+ SoapUI Interview Questions

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