Yuck, xfire sure was about 1000% better than axis, but compared to modern jax-ws and contract first, it really can be just painful sometimes. So, I had some subclasses I wanted to expose over web services, but the directions for inheritance in xfire, either with Aegis or JaxB, both rely on you having horribly verbose spring configs.

We just use @WebService annotations, but we still needed a way to list these extra types that should be listed in the generated wsdl. (It’s worth noting that you get no errors if you don’t do this, but only fields from the parent class will be sent to web service clients)

The “fix” was committed in XFIRE-594 But as usual, the documentation got shotgunned all over somewhere. What you need for inherited types, when you’re using annotations is:

@WebService(endpointInterface = "acme.package.ISomeInterface")
@ServiceProperties(properties = {
    @ServiceProperty(key="writeXsiType", value="true"),
    @ServiceProperty(key="overrideTypesList", list = {
        "acme.package.SomeChildType",
        "acme.package.SomeOtherChildType"}) 
})
public class SomeService implements ISomeInterface
{
    // blah
    SomeParentType someMethod();
}

Then, if you’re just using the simple config from Spring remoting You’re done!