Tech Per

When using CXF either as a client or to serve services, you can quickly get the wish to view the raw inbound and outbound messages sent and received. Turns out, it is rather easy to enable this. There are various ways to enable this, ranging from a pure programmatic approach, to various forms of configuration. I like the custom namespace spring bean config, which is nice and short:

Put the following in your cxf.xml configuration file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xmlns:cxf="http://cxf.apache.org/core"
      xsi:schemaLocation="
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
http://cxf.apache.org/core http://cxf.apache.org/schemas/core.xsd">
   <cxf:bus>
      <cxf:features>
         <cxf:logging/>
      </cxf:features>
   </cxf:bus>
</beans>

This works for both clients and services, although the understanding of inbound and outbound swaps What the above configuration does, is put an interceptor into CXF, that logs the raw in-/outbound messages through its logging API. As a standard, the logging API in CXF is JDK logging, but you can configure CXF to use Log4J logging instead. You will need to ensure, that at least INFO level logging has been enabled for these logger names:

• org.apache.cxf.interceptor.LoggingInInterceptor
• org.apache.cxf.interceptor.LoggingOutInterceptor

There is more information about this at the CXF documentation on configuration and debugging.