How to set timeout for JAX-WS client invocations programmatically in WebSphere

A few of my teammates find it difficult to get this working properly. I hope this write-up and example code below would help you. It's actually not too hard.

What can I adjust?

There are three timeouts you can set:

1. CONNECTION_TIMEOUT: The amount of time WebSphere JAX-WS client would wait to establish a http/https connection (default is 180 seconds)
2. WRITE_TIMEOUT: The amount of time the client would wait to finish sending the request (default is 300 seconds)
3. RESPONSE_TIMEOUT: The amount of time the client would wait to finish receiving the response (default is 300 seconds)

How can I set them in my application code?

You can adjust them by setting properties on the requestContext. See code sample below.

HelloWorldSOAPProxy proxy = new HelloWorldSOAPProxy(); // generated proxy class

Map requestContext = ((BindingProvider)proxy._getDescriptor().getProxy()).getRequestContext();
requestContext.put(com.ibm.wsspi.webservices.Constants.CONNECTION_TIMEOUT_PROPERTY , "1");
requestContext.put(com.ibm.wsspi.webservices.Constants.WRITE_TIMEOUT_PROPERTY , "2");
requestContext.put(com.ibm.wsspi.webservices.Constants.RESPONSE_TIMEOUT_PROPERTY , "40");

proxy.sayHello("Billy");

Note: The property value in the Map must be a String; and in seconds.

My code does not work in my environment. How do I troubleshoot it?

Use the WebSphere AdminConsole to enable this trace specification (on the client side): "com.ibm.ws.websvcs.*=all=enabled:org.apache.axis2.*=all=enabled"

You should see something like this in the trace (if you set the response timeout).

[04/08/2009 19:28:37:937 EDT] 00000000 > ibm.ws.websvcs.transport.http.SOAPOverHTTPSender prepareHttpRequestHeaders(): com.ibm.ws.websvcs.transport.http.SOAPOverHTTPSender@33233323 Entry
[04/08/2009 19:28:37:953 EDT] 00000000 3 ibm.ws.websvcs.transport.common.ConfigFromJAX_WS ...ConfigFromJAX_WS.getReadTimeout() : 40
[04/08/2009 19:28:37:953 EDT] 00000000 3 ibm.ws.websvcs.transport.http.SOAPOverHTTPSender syncTimeoutValue 40000 ms for http

Additional tip:

If you are using a standalone Java client (outside of the J2EE container), you can set the WebSphere traceSpec using system properties.

System.setProperty("java.util.logging.manager","com.ibm.ws.bootstrap.WsLogManager");
System.setProperty("traceSettingsFile","MyTraceSettings.properties");
System.setProperty("java.util.logging.configureByServer","true");

and put your traceSpec in a file (e.g. MyTraceSettings.properties) on the working directory.

traceFileName=c:/temp/trace.log
com.ibm.ws.websvcs.*=all=enabled:org.apache.axis2.*=all=enabled

What if I can't or don't want to change the application code?

You can configure the HTTP Transport Policy to adjust these timeouts. See link in InfoCentre for details.

That's all for now.