Accessing the MessageContext and/or HTTP Request and Response

Sometimes you'll want to access more specific message details in your service implementation. One example might be accessing the actual request or response object itself. This can be done using the WebServiceContext object.

First, declare a private field for the WebServiceContext in your service implementation, and annotate it as a resource:

@Resource
private WebServiceContext context;

Then, within your implementing methods, you can access the MessageContext, HttpServletRequest, and HttpServletResponse as follows:

import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;
import javax.xml.ws.handler.MessageContext;
import org.apache.cxf.transport.http.AbstractHTTPDestination;
...

MessageContext ctx = context.getMessageContext();
HttpServletRequest request = (HttpServletRequest) 
   ctx.get(AbstractHTTPDestination.HTTP_REQUEST);
HttpServletResponse response = (HttpServletResponse) 
   ctx.get(AbstractHTTPDestination.HTTP_RESPONSE);

Of course, it is always a good idea to program defensively if using transport-specific entities like the HttpServletRequest and HttpServletResponse. If the transport were changed (for instance to the JMS transport), then these values would likely be null.