Modifying the namespace PREFIX of the root node of the body of a SOAP Web Services Response....whew!

July 27, 2003 Comment on this post [6] Posted in Web Services | ASP.NET | XML

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I've got a client who doesn't fundamentally understand SOAP, much less XML. They are insisting on a specific prefix for elements in a SOAP Response we are sending to them.

They want:

       <soap:body>
             <samlp:Response xmlns:samlp="thewholedurnthing">
                  <samlp:somestuff>

I'm producing via an ASMX :

         <soap:body>
             <Response xmlns ="thewholedurnthing" xmlns:samlp="thewholedurnthing">
                  <samlp:somestuff>

and they are not digging it. Certainly the prefix doesn't matter as the InfoSet is semantically the same. I suspect the client (who is using Java) is manually <gasp> parsing the Response.

I'm hoping to cover this experience in an upcoming PADNUG talk now tenatively entitled "How NOT to do Web Services: Is ritual suicide the only answer?"

I messed around with the obvious XmlRoot and XmlType attributes and observed they were being wholly ignored for the Root Element of the resulting SOAP payload. I talked to Christian Weyer and Herr Vasters who confirmed that it is 99.9% not possible via simple attributes.

So, taking their advice I will write a quickie SoapExtension, probably something along the lines of:
XmlRootForcePrefix(prefix="samlp", namespace="thewholedurnthing").

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.