Question

I’m calling a C# web service using the .net Service Model and occasionally this web service throws Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer.SoapServerException. I can catch this particular exception as a FaultException in my client code however I cannot get the friendly error message returned by the web service using FaultException.

Following is the network trace for the web service when there is an exception.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    <soap:Body>
        <soap:Fault>
            <faultcode>soap:Server</faultcode>
            <faultstring>Exception of type 'Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer.SoapServerException' was thrown.</faultstring>
            <detail>
                <errorstring xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/">Access to this Web site has been blocked.
    Please contact the administrator to resolve this problem.</errorstring>
                <errorcode xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/">0x81020071</errorcode>
            </detail>
        </soap:Fault>
    </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

I’m very interested in getting the content between errorstring node in the above response. However from FaultException class I cannot retrieve the above error message. Does that mean the .NET framework doesn’t deserialize the above response correctly or am I using the wrong excepetion class here.

The only error message I could get from FaultException is “Exception of type ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer.SoapServerException’ was thrown” nothing else.

Please note that I don’t have any control over web service.

Answer 1

After spending some more time on this I was able to find a solution, you can get access to the exception message by using the following code segment,

FaultException faultException = (FaultException)exception;
MessageFault msgFault = faultException.CreateMessageFault();
XmlElement elm = msgFault.GetDetail<XmlElement>();

Thank you all for your replies.