Question

I am trying to use a SOAP Web Service provided by a third party. I am having trouble getting the service to work correctly in .NET 3.5. I have added it as a web reference and all seems to go well. Problem is when I call the service all I get returned is a NULL object. I have worked with the provider and there service appears to be working correctly. He did mention:

“We are using Axis2 Document/Literal and support SOAP 1 and 2.”

I am not exactly sure what that means as I am a semi-newbie to using Web Services. Do I need to change some configuration parameters or something in .NET to get this service to work correctly?

Answer 1

From my experience, web service interoperability isn’t the magic it claims to be. Especially, between .NET and Java.

• Axis2 is a Java web service “engine”
• Document/Literal is a style of writing a WSDL that results in a special SOAP appearance
• SOAP 1 and 2 (you probably know) the message format and specific versions thereof

all I get returned is a NULL object

Is not much to start with, could you provide more information?

I would recommend, that you try to intercept the exchanged SOAP messages (you can use tcpmon) and check if they are valid. You would probably get an exception if the remote service can’t handle your request so I guess your client as some trouble parsing the response. Additionally, you can use soapUI to generate example request to see what a valid request should look like.