How to: web service mock with SoapUI

Introduction

A lot of organizations use web services (WSDL) for system integration. Often those services are developed alongside the application that uses those services. Instead of waiting for those services to be developed, the application which consumes the web service can develop a mock implementation of the service to test against.

Several strategies

There are several strategies for developing mock services from a WSDL. One of these strategies is using SoapUI. SoapUI is able to consume the WSDL and generate a mock service from it. After the mock service is created, the application in question can consume this mock service and start using it.

The advantage of mocking this way, is that the application makes a full HTTP network round-trip when calling the respective service. All relevant components within the application (WSDL client, parsing the response message) are covered.

Instead of describing how to mock a web service using SoapUI, I created a small screencast demonstrating this. The screencast can be found here: Web service mocks with SoapUI

I think this screencast is more clear and easier to follow than written text. To be effective I keep my screencasts shorter than 5 minutes. Descriptive subtitles are also included. Please let me know if you like this format.

Final thoughts

Besides speeding up development, mocks/stubs may also be used to put the system in a known state which enables automatic integration testing.