WebSphere Portlet Factory 7 - Problems with AXIS Web Services

One of my pals saw this exception earlier today: -

An error has occurred.
The error message returned was: "Error in method displayData_InputPage_NextAction. Error in method displayData_ShowResults. Error in method getDataViaWSDL.invoke. Error in method getDataViaWSDL.invokeInternal. java.net.ConnectException: HTTP ( 404 ) Not Found address : http://wpx7.uk.ibm.com:10039/WPF0001/servlet/AxisServlet". 

Please refer to the logs folder in your deployed application for additional error information.

Click here for a detailed error message.

when attempting to execute a simple model that consumes a Web Service - in his case, this was a WSDL-based service that he had created with another model that consumed DB2 UDB using JDBC.

In addition to the above exception shown in the browser when he ran the model, we also saw: -

Caused by: com.bowstreet.util.WrappedException: The AXIS engine could not find a target service to invoke!  targetService is null [Root exception is javax.xml.ws.soap.SOAPFaultException: The AXIS engine could not find a target service to invoke!  targetService is null]

javax.xml.ws.soap.SOAPFaultException: The AXIS engine could not find a target service to invoke!  targetService is null

in the SystemOut.log file of the underlying WebSphere Portal 7 instance.

I reproduced the same problem on my own lashup, so dug a little further.

I regenerated the models a number of times, and also published and republished my project, but to no avail.

In the end, thinking laterally,  I wondered whether WPF v7 had introduced any new options when creating projects - I know that the dev. team were talking about providing more options for project creation in order to reduce the default size of a generated WAR file.

Sure enough, when I looked at the  Project Properties ( select the project and click the right-hand mouse button ), under WebSphere Portlet Factory -> Feature Info, I saw that there are now new options for Axis 1 Extensions and Web Service Enablement Extensions.

From trial and error, I can tell you that you need BOTH options.