Question

We’ve built a webservice with Spring-WS, and are trying to access it from a C# .NET client. the service works OK with all the tests we’ve done from SoapUI and other java clients, but gets stuck in .NET.

It seems this is a problem with namespaces.

For example, this request works, when the namespace is declared only in the envelope tag, and no element has namespace or prefix in it:

<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"     xmlns="http://mycompany.org/schemas">
<soapenv:Header/>
<soapenv:Body>
  <authenticationRequest>
    <username>user</username>
    <password>password</password>
</authenticationRequest>
</soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

However, this seemingly equivalent request does NOT work:

<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns="http://mycompany.org/schemas">
<soapenv:Header/>
<soapenv:Body>
  <authenticationRequest xmlns="http://mycompany.org/schemas">
    <username>user</username>
    <password>password</password>
</authenticationRequest>
</soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

Notice that in this case, the namespace is declared again in authenticationRequest element.
The error given is that the request does not validate against the XML schema, complaining that the ‘username’ element is not defined.

Unfortunately, when adding a service reference (and also a web reference) in .NET, the code generated by wsdl.exe always creates the request in the second case.

Could someone, please, explain why these two pieces of XML are not equivalent, and how we could, in the C# client…
– remove the second namespace declaration?
– or add a namespace prefix to every element in the request?
– or add a namespace declaration without prefix to each element?

We’ve been trying for hours 🙁

Thanks!

Answer 1

I’ve had similar problems with accessing a Java WS from .NET client. I havent found an elegant solution to the problem, but I did solve it by changing the outgoing/incoming SOAP messages with a SoapExtension:

1. Implement a SoapExtensionAttribute, like this:

   class SoapExtAttribute : SoapExtensionAttribute
   {
       int priority = 0;
   
       public override Type ExtensionType
       {
           get { return typeof(SoapExt); }
       }
   
       public override int Priority
       {
           get
           {
               return priority;
           }
           set
           {
               priority = value;
           }
       }
   }
   

2. Implement a SoapExtension, like this:

   class SoapExt : SoapExtension
   {
       private Stream mWireStream = null;
       private Stream mApplicationStream = null;
   
       public override object GetInitializer(Type serviceType)
       {
           return serviceType;
       }
   
       public override object GetInitializer(LogicalMethodInfo methodInfo, SoapExtensionAttribute attribute)
       {
           return (SoapExtAttribute)attr;
       }
   
       public override void Initialize(object initializer)
       {
       }
   
       public override Stream ChainStream(Stream stream)
       {
           mWireStream = stream;
           mApplicationStream = new MemoryStream();
           return mApplicationStream;
       }
   
   
       public override void ProcessMessage(SoapMessage message)
       {
           StreamWriter writer = null;
           bool fIsServer = (message.GetType() == typeof(SoapServerMessage));
           switch (message.Stage)
           {
               case SoapMessageStage.BeforeDeserialize:
                   string resp = new StreamReader(mWireStream).ReadToEnd();
                   StreamWriter w = new StreamWriter(mApplicationStream);
                   w.WriteLine(resp);
                   w.Flush();
                   mApplicationStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
                   break;
               case SoapMessageStage.AfterSerialize:
                   mApplicationStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
                   string reqXml = new StreamReader(mApplicationStream).ReadToEnd();
   
                   XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
                   doc.LoadXml(reqXml);
   
                   Modify(doc);
   
                   reqXml = doc.InnerXml;
   
                   mApplicationStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
                   writer = new StreamWriter(mWireStream);
                   writer.WriteLine(reqXml);
                   writer.Flush();
   
                   XmlDocument d = new XmlDocument();
                   d.LoadXml(reqXml);
                   ServiceManager.RequestSoap = d.LastChild.OuterXml;
                   break;
           }
       }
   
       private void Modify(XmlDocument doc)
       {
           // Change the doc in whatever way you want, e.g. remove/add the prefixes
       }
   }