Question

I will need to be able to receive this xml data from a Java WebService and I am not really sure what to expose in my WebMethod so I can consume it? It is just a basic order and items. In .Net I would just have passed an order object List.

I should expand a bit further. It is an Oracle BPEL process that will need to map to this exposed C# WebService. I would need to expose the OrderNumber, ItemNumber ,etc (as shown in XML). The issue I am having is that I would have 1 to Many items ,etc so I can’t just expose the basic items (string, int).

Probably pretty trivial for most the community here…just not sure how to do it? Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

I could do something like (build an order object and it appears to show the xml as I would expect?)

[WebMethod]
public static List<Orders> GetOrders(List<Orders> ordersList)
{
  List<Orders oList = ordersList;

  return oList;
}

XML:

<Order>
  <OrderNumber>12345</OrderNumber>
  <OrderDate>01/25/2010</OrderDate>
  <OrderSource>Affiliate123</OrderSource>
  <Items>
     <ItemNumber>123478</ItemNumber>
     <Qty>5</Qty>
     <UOM>EA</UOM>
     <Description>Test Item</Description>
  </Items>
 </Order>

Answer 1

You have answered your own question. The .NET web services framework will map a return type of List<T> to a sequence of T at the SOAP level, just as if you had used a T[] (array of T).

When I write up a quick sample service just like yours, this is the XML it returns:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
  <soap:Body>
    <GetOrdersResponse xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">
      <GetOrdersResult>
        <Order>
          <OrderNumber>int</OrderNumber>
          <OrderDate>dateTime</OrderDate>
          <OrderSource>string</OrderSource>
          <Items>
            <Item xsi:nil="true" />
            <Item xsi:nil="true" />
          </Items>
        </Order>
        <Order>
          <OrderNumber>int</OrderNumber>
          <OrderDate>dateTime</OrderDate>
          <OrderSource>string</OrderSource>
          <Items>
            <Item xsi:nil="true" />
            <Item xsi:nil="true" />
          </Items>
        </Order>
      </GetOrdersResult>
    </GetOrdersResponse>
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

Your BPEL layer should be able to consume that pretty easily.