Question

I’m writing a web method that publishes an xhtml file to a database. This web service should be technology agnostic (support Java applications for example). The publish method returns a string. In the return I want to inform the calling application about the success or failure of the publish. In addition I want to include :

• a collection of parsing errors
• a collection of invalid values (this is determined by matching values in database)
• a message if there is a version conflict

Below is one format I could use. Is there a guideline web service developers follow when formatting web method return values? Thank you.

 <result>
        <info name="successful" value="true"/>
        <info name="successtype" value="partial"/> 
        <info name="versionconflict" value="false"/>
        <parseErr>
            <err field="itemId" desc="Missing required element Item Id"/>
            <err field="content" desc="Required tag <content> is missing."/> 
            <err field="purchaseDate desc="Invalid date format. Date should be in mm-dd-yyyy."/>
        </parseErr>

        <failedAttributes>
            <err attribute="userName" value="NULL"/>
            <err attribute="orderCategory" value="Porduce"/>
        </failedAttributes>

    </result>

Answer 1

you could look into SOAP faults rather than have failure information as part of the contract methods return value.