29.3. Using a JAX-WS Catalog

The JAX-WS specification mandates that all implementations support:

This catalog facility uses the XML catalog facility specified by OASIS. All of the JAX-WS APIs and annotation that take a WSDL URI use the catalog to resolve the WSDL document's location.

This means that you can provide an XML catalog file that rewrites the locations of your WSDL documents to suite specific deployment environments.

JAX-WS catalogs are standard XML catalogs as defined by the OASIS XML Catalogs 1.1 specification. They allow you to specify mapping:

Table 29.1, “Common JAX-WS Catalog Elements” lists some common elements used for WSDL location resolution.

The JAX-WS specification mandates that the catalog used to resolve WSDL and XML Schema documents is assembled using all available resources named META-INF/jax-ws-catalog.xml. If your application is packaged into a single JAR, or WAR, you can place the catalog into a single file.

If your application is packaged as multiple JARs, you can split the catalog into a number of files. Each catalog file could be modularized to only deal with WSDLs accessed by the code in the specific JARs.