soapUI Composite Project

In this soapUI tutorial we will explore a nice feature in soapUI called "Composite Project". This is a property in soapUI project which takes boolean values true or false. Click on soapUI project and you will see the project properties tab in soapUI and there you can see the option "Composite Project" and by default the value will be false.
Now lets discuss what this exactly means to us. First create a project on a work space and save the project. Make sure you have atleast one test suite and one test case in the project. Go back to the directory where you saved the project and see how many files you have. You will see a work space XML file and also a project XML file. In a way this is good as the number of files as less, it is easy to maintain. But imagine if multiple people are working on web services automation using soapUI and everyone is working different test cases. In this case, it will be hard to maintain a single file and merge it always. Here comes the use of soapUI "Composite Project" property. Create another project and change the "Composite Project" property to "true". Now create a test suite and create a test case inside that and save the project. Go back to the folder where the project is saved and check for the files. You will see a seperate folder for project with soapUI project file and settings files along with a folder for test suite and the interface folders. Now navigate to the soapUI test suite folder, you will see settings file, element order file, and the soapUI test case file. In this case each test case will be mainted in different soapUI XML files and each test suite will be a different folder. This way multiple people can work different test cases at the same time on the same project. This is more useful if you are working on a large web service automation project with hundreds of operations are present. Version control is also more easier with this approach.