Maven: A Developer's Notebook

Writing a Custom Goal

To generate a client library for a SOAP service, you need to download the WSDL you are going to pass to wsdl2java. Define a custom goal—weather:get-wsdl—to download the service description from NOAA.

How do I do that?

To write your own goal, add some Jelly script to the weather/maven.xml file. Here's a simple custom goal that retrieves a WSDL document with Ant's get task. The custom goal is defined as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  
<project xmlns:j="jelly:core" xmlns:ant="jelly:ant" 
    xmlns:maven="jelly:maven" default="jar">
  
  <goal name="weather:get-wsdl" description="Retrieves WSDL document">
    <j:set var="wsdl" 
        value="http://weather.gov/forecasts/xml/DWMLgen/wsdl/ndfdXML.wsdl"/>
    <ant:echo>Retrieving WSDL from ${wsdl}</ant:echo>
    <ant:get src="${wsdl}" dest="${basedir}/src/wsdl/weather.wsdl"/>
  </goal>
  
</project>

The value of the ${wsdl} property is set with j:set, a message is printed to the console, and the document is retrieved and saved to weather/src/wsdl. This script uses the echo task from Apache Ant to print out a message, and you can run it from the command line with maven weather:get-wsdl, which produces the following output:

Note

In your project, the URL of the WSDL document should be defined in project.properties. This will make configuration much easier.

C:\dev\mavenbook\code\weather>maven weather:get-wsdl _ _ _ _ | \/ |_ _ _Apache_ _ _ _ _ | |\/| / _` \ V / -_) ' \ ~ intelligent projects ~ |_| |_\_ _,_|\_/\_ _ _|_||_| v. 1.0.2 build:start: ...