Can I test stateful web services with SoapUI?
You can do what's called "Passing Properties" in SoapUI. For example, all of our web services must first call the authentication web service and get an authentication token.
I set this up in SoapUI so that the returned authentication token from the auth service is passed on to subsequent requests. This seems to work pretty well, but if I haven't missed a trick, I wouldn't want to configure it for a lot of web services (i.e. you must have an entry for every call you want to transfer data to / from).
Yes, building SoapUI tests is slow, repetitive work. We didn't find it until we rewrite the SOAP server, and it does large unit and system tests, but is slow to generate them.
Oh, and watch out for memory leaks. Save very often. When you run out of memory, you can no longer save it. It sucks a little.
The stuff carrying the property is awesome - you can have different scopes (test, request, global) and you can use GroovyScript to create dynamic stuff (like view a specific date related to today's date, etc.)
With a properly formatted WSDL file, it will generate template requests for you, but you still have to tweak them the honest bit - or at least I did.
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I don't know if it's practical to do this with SoapUI, but I've done things like this with iTKO LISA and Parasoft SOATest. This was not for testing stateful web services, but simply for doing multiple test steps, storing the results that are used in the next steps. Both LISA and SOATest have the ability to define steps in a GUI that can store fragments of responses that are used in subsequent requests.
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