WebService GET/POST Call and SOAP

Question

I was going through this link below:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/819267

Here it explains to enable HTTP GET/POST calls for web service, for calling a service directly through the browser.

Questions:

1. While calling through browser are we using GET or POST? How it gets decided?

2. If we are using regular HTTP GET/POST instead of SOAP, where does SOAP comes in? Or is it wrong to say that web services always use SOAP protocol for sending receiving messages?

Answer 1

1. If you're passing all parameters through the query string of the URL, then you're using GET. If you're building the request using something Fiddler to explicitly use POST, then you're using POST.

2. If you're using GET/POST with .NET Web Services, SOAP doesn't come in to the picture at all. You'll also notice that as your service gets more complex, you lose the ability to call the Service through GET/POST because the complexity of SOAP is needed to wrap the data.

Answer 2

1. If the request you are making has a payload/request body then a POST request will be used.

2. The SOAP protocol defines the type of message that is sent, typically as the body of an HTTP POST request or the body of an HTTP response. Not all web services use SOAP, although rightly or wrongly it has become the de facto standard.