Debugging webservices can sometimes be a painful experience. ColdFusion provides some help via the getSoapRequest and getSoapResponse functions, which enable you to view the SOAP request / response XML.

Suppose you want to see all SOAP requests and responses sent to the ColdFusion server. This can be achieved by making a simple change to the client-config.wsdd file. On my multi server ColdFusion 8 installation, the file is located in:

[Installationdrive]\JRun4\servers\cfusion\cfusion-ear\cfusion-war\WEB-INF

The beginning of the file has the following declarations:

Uncomment the lines around the requestFlow and responseFlow tags. Save the file and restart ColdFusion. You should then see SOAP requests and responses being written out to the cfusion-out.log file.

Note the warning in the snippet above about not enabling SOAP logging in a production environment. For obvious reasons it makes sense not to leave logging enabled for long periods in production.