Merging Web services updates

Once you have created a Web service you may want to make changes to it. Although you cannot propagate all your changes to all the required files automatically, in order to retain your changes while updating the Web service you can use the merge a generated skeleton file function. This will allow you to regenerate your Web service while keeping your changes intact.

The merge generated skeleton file option can be enabled in the Web service preferences on the Resource Management page. This option is disabled by default. If it is enabled, when a skeleton file of the same name already exists in the workspace, the newly generated skeleton file will merge with the existing skeleton file. Enable this to preserve code that you have already modified in the existing skeleton files.

Note that when this preference is enabled, if you change the return type of an interface, the resulting skeleton file will have a method returning the type as defined in the new interface but would have a method body from the original skeleton file (which would be returning a different type). This will result in an compilation error that the you will have to correct manually.

To set any of the Web services preferences, follow these steps:
  1. Click Window > Preferences to open the Preferences notebook.
  2. Expand Web services or Web and XML, and click the preference category that you want to set
  3. Select the check boxes that you want to set as the default when creating your Web service.
  4. Click OK to apply the changes and close the Preferences notebook.
If you require more information on any of the options, select the option and press F1.
Note: This function does not merge annotations in JAX-WS Web services. The annotations in the new skeleton file will be discarded while the existing annotations remain untouched.

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