Question

I there a way to know if a request is a soap request on AuthenticateRequest event for HttpApplication? Checking ServerVariables[“HTTP_SOAPACTION”] seems to not be working all the time.

public void Init(HttpApplication context) {
    context.AuthenticateRequest += new EventHandler(AuthenticateRequest);
}

protected void AuthenticateRequest(object sender, EventArgs e) {
    app = sender as HttpApplication;
    if (app.Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_SOAPACTION"] != null) {
        // a few requests do not enter here, but my webservice class still executing
        // ...
    }
}

I have disabled HTTP POST and HTTP GET for webservices in my web.config file.

<webServices>
    <protocols>
      <remove name="HttpGet" />
           <remove name="HttpPost" />
      <add name="AnyHttpSoap" />
    </protocols>
</webServices>

Looking at ContentType for soap+xml only partially solves my problem. For example,

Cache-Control: no-cache
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 1131
Content-Type: text/xml
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: ro
Host: localhost
mymethod: urn:http://www.wsnamespace.com/myservice

Some clients instead of having the standard header SOAPAction: “http://www.wsnamespace.com/myservice/mymethod“, have someting like in example above. “mymethod” represents the method in my web service class with [WebMethod] attribute on it and “http://www.wsnamespace.com/myservice” is the namespace of the webservice. Still the service works perfectly normal.
The consumers use different frameworks (NuSOAP from PHP, .NET, Java, etc).

Answer 1

You could look at Request.ContentType property, which if properly set by the client should be

application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8

The utf-8 part may not be present.

Aside from that, surely you can just check the URL, and if it’s a webservice one then that tells you what it is.