OpenSAML user discussion

[Tom Delorenzi <>]

I am trying to use opensaml in a perhaps non standered way. I have a simple 
tomcat
servlet that gets a string off of http get.
I can take that string and build an artifact as follows:
SAML1ArtifactBuilderFactory builder=new SAML1ArtifactBuilderFactory();
AbstractSAML1Artifact artifact=builder.buildArtifact(artifactToken); 

What I cannot figure out is how to use the Soap objects in saml to build an 
assertion
using this artifact. I need to build a soap message and send it to a server 
using http.
I read that there is no soap output client built in but I can easily dump the 
formatted
text into a connection of my own. I looked at SOAP11Encoder but it needs a 
context. 
I looked at BasicSoapContext but I didn't see any way to put my artifact in 
there.
I looked at various XMLHelper\builder objects but none that I saw took an
artifact(or its parent) to generate something usefull.
If anyone can point me in the right direction that would be great.
The only other way I can think of going is just getting a seperate soap
client and manually building my tags in it. The only thing that
feels redundant about that is I will have (say spring) decode the
message and then I have to pull out the saml payload and put it back
into saml to have saml parse it and build saml objects.