Merged skeleton files for web services updates

After you create a web service, you might want to change it. Although you cannot automatically propagate all your changes to all the required files, to retain your changes while you update the web service, you can merge a generated skeleton file. You can then regenerate your web service, and your changes remain intact.

The merge generated skeleton file option can be enabled in the web service preferences on the Resource Management page. This option is enabled by default. If it is enabled, when a skeleton file of the same name exists in the workspace, the newly generated skeleton file merges with the existing skeleton file. Enable this option to preserve code that you modified in the existing skeleton files.

Note: When this preference is enabled, if you change the return type of an interface, the resulting skeleton file has a method that returns the new interface type but has a method body from the original skeleton file, which returns a different type. This change results in a compilation error that you must correct manually.

Note: This function does not merge annotations in JAX-WS web services. The annotations in the new skeleton file are discarded, and the existing annotations remain untouched.