Submit a SOAP Web service request with RAW SOAP XML

Question

I've got a simple WCF Web service that uses basicHttpBinding to make it SOAP 1.1 compliant. When called with a WSDL-derived proxy (by setting a service or Web reference), the service works great.

A business partner wants to call the service directly with the SOAP XML. I know how to provide that XML, but I'm not sure how to process the XML when the business partner submits the request.

Am I making this harder than I need to? Will the XML request call the service as though it were called through the proxy and will the response naturally make the request happy? Or do I need to do something extra to process the XML request and then hand something (what?) off to my service?

I know there are some similar questions on SO, but they all seem to deal with the issue of getting the XML, not processing it.

Answer 1

It should be sufficient to just send the raw SOAP message to the endpoint URL of the service. The WSDL-derived proxy just generates the SOAP from your objects and manages connection handling and transport (probably HTTP) details.

It might be possible that you need to add a SOAPAction HTTP header, depending on the service.

If you intercept the communication between your WSDL-derived proxy and the servcie (e.g. using TCPmon), you will see the SOAP message and the used HTTP headers.