It is quite common that WCF has problems working with old and none-.NET web services. Usually the old “web reference” (ASMX) tehcnology works better in this kind of situtations, but this one time I was determined to solve the challange using WCF.
After having Visual Studio generate me the client classes I did a unit test to see if I could call the web service successfully. It turned out that the call succeeded and the function returned a response. Unfortunately the response object only contained the result code and descrption, but the data property was null.
Usually in this kind of situations I first turn to Wireshark or some similiar network traffic packer analyzer to see what’s actually gets sent and returned. This this time I had to come up with an alternative way as the web service only allowed me to use a secure HTTPS address so all the traffic was encrypted. As the calls returned a valid object with part of the expected data I knew the authentication was working and there was nothing wrong with the message headers. This meant it was enough for me to see the message content and writing this simple message inspector worked as the solution.
public class SoapMessageInspector : IClientMessageInspector, IEndpointBehavior
{
public string LastRequest { get; private set; }
public string LastResponse { get; private set; }
#region IClientMessageInspector Members
public void AfterReceiveReply(ref System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message reply, object correlationState)
{
LastResponse = reply.ToString();
}
public object BeforeSendRequest(ref System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message request, IClientChannel channel)
{
LastRequest = request.ToString();
return null;
}
#endregion
#region IEndpointBehavior Members
public void ApplyClientBehavior(ServiceEndpoint endpoint, ClientRuntime clientRuntime)
{
clientRuntime.MessageInspectors.Add(this);
}
public void AddBindingParameters(ServiceEndpoint endpoint, System.ServiceModel.Channels.BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters) { }
public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(ServiceEndpoint endpoint, EndpointDispatcher endpointDispatcher) { }
public void Validate(ServiceEndpoint endpoint) { }
#endregion
}
Usage
inspector = new SoapMessageInspector();
factory.Endpoint.Behaviors.Add(inspector);
The message inspector revealed to me that the call was sent ok and also the data returned by the server was fine. It was the WCF framework that failed to properly deserialize the response.
The property for the result data was called Any in the response class, so I took a look at the WSDL provided by the server.
<s:complexType name="response"> <s:sequence> <s:element type="s0:statusType" name="status" maxOccurs="1" minOccurs="1"/> <s:any maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="0" processContents="skip" namespace="targetNamespace"/> </s:sequence> </s:complexType>
The any WSDL element leaves the structure of the content undefined. WCF translates this to a Any property of type XmlElment. The reason why WCF could not process the response correctly was pobably caused by this and the minOccurs value.
After trying to edit some of the attributes of the generated classes without success, I decided to take over the parsing of the response using a custom response formater.
public class MyResponseBehaviour : IOperationBehavior
{
public void ApplyClientBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, ClientOperation clientOperation)
{
clientOperation.Formatter = new MyResponseFormatter(clientOperation.Formatter);
}
public void AddBindingParameters(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Channels.BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters) { }
public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, DispatchOperation dispatchOperation) { }
public void Validate(OperationDescription operationDescription) { }
}
public class MyResponseFormatter : IClientMessageFormatter
{
private const string XmlNameSpace = "http://www.eroom.com/eRoomXML/2003/700";
private IClientMessageFormatter _InnerFormatter;
public eRoomResponseFormatter(IClientMessageFormatter innerFormatter)
{
_InnerFormatter = innerFormatter;
}
#region IClientMessageFormatter Members
public object DeserializeReply( System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message message, object[] parameters )
{
XPathDocument document = new XPathDocument(message.GetReaderAtBodyContents());
XPathNavigator navigator = document.CreateNavigator();
XmlNamespaceManager manager = new XmlNamespaceManager(navigator.NameTable);
manager.AddNamespace("er", XmlNameSpace);
if (navigator.MoveToFollowing("response", XmlNameSpace))
{
ExecuteXMLCommandResponse commandResponse = new ExecuteXMLCommandResponse();
// and some XPath calls...
return commandResponse;
}
else
{
throw new NotSupportedException("Failed to parse response");
}
}
public System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message SerializeRequest( System.ServiceModel.Channels.MessageVersion messageVersion, object[] parameters )
{
return _InnerFormatter.SerializeRequest( messageVersion, parameters );
}
#endregion
}
As the web service only provided one function returning a fairly simple response object writing the formater only required a couple of lines of code to parse
the response data using XPath. As soon as I had replaced the default formatter with my own, things started working perfectly.
factory.Endpoint.Contract.Operations.Find("ExecuteXMLCommand").Behaviors.Add(new MyResponseBehaviour());
I found out later that the message inspector I had written earlier also provided me with a way to throw exceptions with meaningful messages as the server always included a error descrption in the SOAP error envelope that WCF did not reveal.
Developer's Dump 