SoapUI Interview Questions and answers preparation will help you prepare for your upcoming API testing interview. We have covered all SoapUI realtime interview questions in detail with full explanation in our question answer series 1) What is Service Oriented architecture (SOA)? Service Oriented Architecture is a style of software design where services are provided by application components through a communication protocol over a network. Basic principles of SOA are : • Independence of Vendors • Independence of Technologies • Independence of Products 2) What are the different Soap WSDL bindings? • SOAP 1.1 binding • SOAP 1.2 binding • HTTP binding 3) What are the capabilities of SOAP UI Tool? • Mock Service – Simulation of Web Services before they are actually implemented • Scripting – Groovy or Java Script allows for different operations to be performed (Ex: Dynamic Load configurations, dynamic mocking etc) • Functional Testing • Performance Testing • Building Test Automation • Provide complete coverage of web services and web services application through automation 4) What do ‘200 OK’ response code in SOAP response indicate? ‘200 OK’ Response code in SOAP response indicates the SOAP request was processed successfully by the service provider and a response was generated to the service requester successfully. 5) What do ‘405 Method Not Allowed’ response code in SOAP response indicate? ‘405 Method Not Allowed’ Response code in SOAP response from service provider to sender indicates the SOAP message via HTTP method other than HTTP POST was sent to the service provider 6) What do ‘415 Unsupported Media Type’ response code in SOAP response indicate? ‘415 Unsupported Media Type’ in SOAP response to sender indicates the content type header with a value of text/xml was not sent by the sender to the service provider. 7) What are the building blocks of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)? • Web Services • Mediation • Composition 8) What are Web Services? • Individual units of business logic in SOA • Communicates with each other and other programs and applications by sending messages • Consists of public interface definition which assigns an identity to the services and establishes its invocation rules 9) What are the commonly used web services frameworks?. • Web Services Invocation Framework • Web Services Interoperability Technology • Windows Communication Foundation • Java Web Services Development Pack/Glass Fish 10) What are the advantages of SOAP? • SOAP messages can be transported over various transports such as HTP, HTTPS, JMS, SMTP • SOAP is extensible and other standards such as WS-Security, WS-Addressing, WS-Reliable Messaging can be extended 11) What are the fault message elements in SOAP? • Faultcode – Used to define type of fault • Faultstring – Explanation about the fault • Faultactor – Indication of responsible party who caused the fault • Detail – application specific error information related to body element 12) What are the different areas where web services testing is used? • Unit Testing • Functional Testing • Integration Testing • Performance Testing 13) What are the different types of Message Exchanging Patterns in SOAP? • Request and Response Pattern – Service Requester send a requests and Service Provider send back the response in relation to the request • Fire and Forget Pattern – Service Requester sends request and there is no response from a service provider (Ex: Ping to a Service) 14) What are the common errors that you have when doing web services testing which is not related to actual request/response testing but more of issues you face during the initial setup to do web services testing? The common errors that we face during the initial setup of SOAP UI Request to do the testing are as follows: • We might be not updating our definition of the request and using an old definitions – Because of this we will get a server exception when submitting invalid request • Not using a valid SOAP endpoint – Since testing could potentially be done on different virtual machines, we need to make sure that the correct endpoint is used and updated during every web service testing • Trying to process a web service request without making sure the application server has been started and the application deployed successfully 15) What are the best general practices from a SOAP UI tester to take before starting web services testing? • Ensure the application server has started and the deployment is successfully • Check the service endpoint in a web browser to make sure web service is brought up and active • Update the endpoints in the SOAP UI tools • Update the definition using the SOAP endpoint to make sure you have the latest request • Make sure you understand the structure of the request and response for the test service under consideration • Make sure before you submit a request, do a schema validation of the XML (Right click on the SOAP Request and Validate the request) 16) What do ‘202 Accepted’ response code in SOAP response indicate? ‘202 Accepted’ Response code in SOAP response indicates the SOAP request was processed successfully by the service provider and there won’t be any response from the service provider to the service requester. 17) What is JSON? Java script object Notation (JSON) is a lightweight data exchange format similar to XML. JSON uses key value pairs to represent data which are carried inside a message 18) What is WSDL? Web Services Description Language provides a formal definition of the web services through abstract and concrete definition of an interface. 19) What are the components of WSDL? WSDL is an XML documents which has element at the root and the child elements has the following: • - data types used by the web services usually through a XML schema • - abstract representation of messages used by the web services • - abstract representation of operations and message exchange patterns used in web services • - element that connects the and elements into a physical transport protocol 20) What is the difference between and is an abstract set of endpoints supported by one or moer operations whereas describes how the operations are invoked by specifying protocol and data format specifications for the operations and messages for each port type. is an abstraction part of WSDL whereas is the concrete part of WSDL 21) What is the default encoding used in SOAP request and how it can be changed? UTF-8 is the default encoding character set used in SOAP UI Request. You can change the encoding in the Request Properties pane in SOAP UI Tool 22) How would you know if the web services have been deployed or not? Start the application server after the installation of the software and deployment of the application, then open a web browser and load the service to get if the web services is available or not: Ex: http://localhost:8080//services/ The above URL will give you the list of web services available for your reference. Note: You can replace the localhost with the IP address information if the deployment is in a virtual machine. 23) Ho would you find out the WSDL of a particular web service? After the starting of the application server you need to load the WSDL of a particular web service in a web browser to find the WSDL information of the service as follows: Ex: http://localhost:8080//services/?WSDL Note: You can replace the localhost with the IP address information if the deployment is in a virtual machine. 24) What do ‘400 Bad Request’ response code in SOAP response indicate? ‘400 Bad Request’ Response code in SOAP response from service provider to sender indicates either the HTTP or the XML request was not well formed and does not conform to schema. 25) What do ‘500 Internal Server Error’ response code in SOAP response indicate? ‘500 Internal Server Error’ Response code in SOAP indicates the request from the sender has created a fault message from the service provider to the sender. 26) What are the disadvantages of SOAP? • Performance degradation of heavy XML Processing • Complexities associated with usage of WS-* specifications • Bulky and complex SOAP based web services standards 27) What is REST API? Representational State Transfer (REST) RESTful web services are lightweight alternative to SOAP where emphasis is on point to point communication over HTTP primarily using plain old XML(POX) messages 28) What do ‘404 Not Found’ response code in SOAP response indicate? ‘404 Not Found’ Response code in SOAP indicates the request from the sender could not find the requested resource in the service provider. This might be because the end point is incorrect, or the resource service is incorrect (or) both the endpoint and the resource service is correct but the application server is not deployed currently and is down (Ex: Production Maintenance Period) 29) What is the difference between SOAP and REST API a. SOAP posts a message to the URL whereas REST API can GET resources, DELETE Resources, PUT resources, POST Messages b. SOAP uses XML messages whereas REST can use XML, JSON messages c. SOAP uses only one URL for the service whereas REST uses several URLs (Action defined by the URL and the protocol) 30) What is a Service? A Service is a discreet unit of functionality that can be accessed remotely and acted upon independently Service has important properties as: • Logically represents a business activity with a specified outcome • Self-Contained • Is a Black-Box for its customers • May consists underlying services 31) What is SOAP? Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is considered foremost messaging standard for use with web services. SOAP is a lightweight protocol for exchanging information in a de-centralized distributed environment. It is a XML Based protocol. 32) What is the message format of a SOAP message? SOAP message format consists of the following: • SOAP Envelope • Header • Body 33) What are the many different communication channels available for web service? SOAP HTTP POST HTTP GET 34) Give names of some API testing tools that you are aware of :- SoapUI,Katalon studio, Jmeter, assertible, postman and lots more 35) What is the different dispatching style of Mock Operation? • Sequence • Script • Random • Query_Match • XPATH 36) How testers can test early using web services when the code is being developed? Testers can use mock services to begin testing of the web services. When he WSDL is ready, testers can simulate the service implementation and test different applications under consideration 37) What are the benefits of using mock services for testing web services applications? • Mock Services helps start early testing even before the code development is done • Mock Services helps to mimic the behavior of inaccessible, unavailable or paid services • Mock Service helps to add test setup of services which is not available to simulate integration testing 38) What language is used by SOAP and REST? SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) uses WSDL (Web Services Description Language) REST (Representational State Transfer) uses WADL (Web Application Description Language) 39) What is WADL? Web Application Description Language (WADL) is a machine readable XML description of HTTP based web services. WADL is platform and language independent and helps in reuse of applications 40) What is stateless communication? Stateless communication means every HTTP request happens in complete isolation and the client information is not stored in the server. The server never relies on previous information from the client 41) What are the key to REST web services? • Representation in URI • Stateless communication • Resources linking • Multiple forms of resources Use standard HTTP method such as GET,PUT, DELETE, POST 42) What are the different mechanism in implementing web services • SOAP based web services • REST based web services 43) What is WS-Security? WS-Security facilitates end to end security by maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of messages without relying on the transport level security provided by point to point security 44) What is WS-Policy? WS-Policy defines a framework for allowing web services to express their constraints and requirements as policy constraints 45) What is WS-SecurityPolicy? WS-SecurityPolicy defines how messages needs to be secured based on WS-Policy Framework 46) What is Service chaining? Service chaining is a concept where the response of one service request acts as an input into another web service request 47) What is ESB? Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an architecture with a set of rules and principles integrating numerous applications together over a bus like infrastructure. ESB helps to decouple different disparate system by having a common communication across the bus without the need to know the functionality of the different systems. 48) What is WS-Addressing? WS-Addressing provides a mechanism where the messages can be routed from origination to destination in a generic way independent of the underlying protocol (Ex: HTTP, JMS) 49) What is code first web services development approach? In code first development approach the following is done: • Developers start with the service implementation of the class • WSDL is generated based on service implementation of the class 50) Which development approach is better – Code First or Contract First development approach and why? Contract First development approach is better than Code first development approach for the following reasons: • In Contract first development approach, WSDL is generated based on the business requirements gathered from the customer and then the business logis is written, in this way the WSDL remains intact when you change the service container whereas in code first development you cannot guarantee the WSDL intact since WSDL is generated from the code • Since you are writing the code first and then generating the WSDL this impacts customers since any change to the code in the future a new WSDL has to be generated and client has to be notified whereas in contract first the WSDL is not changed, hence contract first is flexible than code first development approach • Less changes to the customers in contract first development approach by introducing proper changes to the schema than code first development approach and hence contract first is less expensive than code first development approach 51) What are the types of SOAP web services development approaches? • Code First Methodology • Contract First Methodology 52) What is contract first web services development approach? In contract first development approach the following is done: • WSDL is written first by getting business requirements from customers • When WSDL is defined, developers implement the business logic of the web services • Service development framework provide service skeleton for developers o focus on developing business logic of the code 53) What languages are used by Soap UI? Soap UI makes use of Groovy and javascript languages 54) What is the use of properties in Soap UI? In soapUI data and its value is stored in key::value format. The main use of soapUI properties is to retireve and store data