Using P6 R8 Web Services in Web Applications (Weblogic)

If you are familiar with Primavera P6 development, you would know about the "P6 Web Services", which in practice, is a web application exposing the functionality of the Integration API through web services. Recently I had to consume a bunch of these web services in a Web Application (to be deployed on Weblogic AS). If you take a look at the Demo provided by the Web Services Installation (a Java swing application that creates a sample project), you would notice the libraries required to consume such services, the most important of which are cxf-bundle, p6ws-jaxws-client and osdt-*. After developing a pretty simple application and deploying it on Weblogic AS, I hit the following error:

weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.ClientInstanceInvocationHandler cannot be cast to org.apache.cxf.frontend.ClientProxy

After lots of googling, I finally found the problem. The CXF libraries used in the web service stubs are being overridden by Weblogic AS which causes the problem. The solution is to add the package preference setting in weblogic.xml file in your application (if you don't have one create it using File->New->Weblogic Deployment Descriptor). So your weblogic.xml should look something like:

<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'windows-1252'?>
<weblogic-web-app xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/weblogic-web-app" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/weblogic-web-app http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/weblogic-web-app/1.2/weblogic-web-app.xsd">
  <context-root>yourapp</context-root>
  <container-descriptor>
  <prefer-application-packages>
    <package-name>org.apache.cxf.binding.soap.saaj.*</package-name>
    <package-name>org.apache.cxf.endpoint.*</package-name>
    <package-name>org.apache.cxf.frontend.*</package-name>
    <package-name>org.apache.cxf.transport.http.*</package-name>
    <package-name>org.apache.cxf.interceptor.*</package-name>
    <package-name>org.apache.cxf.transports.http.configuration.*</package-name>
  </prefer-application-packages>
  </container-descriptor>
</weblogic-web-app>

This should resolve the library conflict. If you get an error like this:

This class does not support SAAJ 1.1 weblogic

The Reason for the problem is Weblogic’s default SAAJ implementation, so you need to override the properties to use a better implementation weblogic.xml.saaj  package. You can do that by adding the following parameters to your Weblogic startup script:

JAVA_OPTIONS= %JAVA_OPTIONS% -Djavax.xml.soap.MessageFactory=com.sun.xml.messaging.saaj.soap.ver1_1.SOAPMessageFactory1_1Impl -Djavax.xml.soap.SOAPConnectionFactory=weblogic.wsee.saaj.SOAPConnectionFactoryImpl