For one project I was working on, I needed to get access to the SOAP headers of web service call. I am using the Apache CXF services stack. There were quite a few threads on how to get access to SOAP headers from an interceptor. In my case, I needed the contents of the header inside the implementation.

wsdl2java does have the ability to create a java service class that provides access to the headers using the -exsh option. This was not an option for me since even with this flag on, the headers were not added to the service calls. I think it was how the WSDL I had was designed. This meant that I needed to do the work of pulling out the headers myself.

The SOAP headers can be retrieved from the JAX-WS SOAPMessageContext the easiest. Getting access to this was not trivial. I added the resource annotation to get access to the WebServiceContext. Unfortunately the MessageContext this gave me was not a SOAPMessageContext and provided no way to access the SOAP headers.

After looking through the code for the SoapMessage CXF class, I found how it gets the headers out of the Message. I came up with the following to access the headers from my implementation class:

@Resource
private WebServiceContext context;

private List<Header> getHeaders() {
    MessageContext messageContext = context.getMessageContext();
    if (messageContext == null || !(messageContext instanceof WrappedMessageContext)) {
        return null;
    }

    Message message = ((WrappedMessageContext) messageContext).getWrappedMessage();
    List<Header> headers = CastUtils.cast((List<?>) message.get(Header.HEADER_LIST));
    return headers;
}

This provides all of the headers available. To get the specific one I needed using JAXB I added the following to my code:

List<Header> headers = getHeaders();
if (headers != null) {
    for (Header h: headers) {
        Object o = h.getObject();

        // Unwrap the node using JAXB
        if (o instanceof Node) {
            o = getJaxb().createUnmarshaller().unmarshal((Node) o);
        }

        if (o instanceof DesiredHeaderType) {
            // Do whatever is required with the header object instance
        }
    }
}

This way of accessing the headers turns out to be much simpler than writing an interceptor and trying to stuff the results of that into the request.