Connect to web service fails

Question

I have a web application which fetches information from a web service. It works fine in our development environment.

Now I'm trying to get it to work in a customer's environment instead, where the web service is from a third party. The problem is that the first time the application tries to fetch information it cannot connect to the web service. When it tries again just seconds later it works fine. If I wait a couple of hours and try again, the problem occurs again.

I'm having a hard time believing this is a programming error, as our customer and the maker of the web service thinks. I think it has to do with one of the IIS or some security in the network. But I don't have much to go on and can't reproduce the error in our development environment.

Answer 1

Is it failing with timeOutException when you try to connect first time?. If yes, this could be the result on start up time of the service

Answer 2

I have a rule: "Always assume its your fault until you can demonstrate otherwise". After over 20 years, I still stick to it.

So there are therefore two cases:

1. The code is broken
2. There is a specific issue with the live environment

Since you want to demonstrate that the problem is (2) you need to test calls to the service, from the live environment, using something other than your application. Exactly what will depend on the nature of the web service but we've found SoapUI to be helpful.

The other thing that's not clear is whether you are making calls to the live service from your development environment - if, in testing, you're not communicating with the same instance of the service then that's an additional variable that will need to be considered (and I appreciate that you're not always given the option).

Lastly, @Krishna is right - there may be a spin up issue with the remote service (hence my question about whether you're talking to the same service from your dev environment) and -horrible as it is - the solution in the first instance may simply be to find a way to allow for this!

Answer 3

The error was the web service from the third party. The test stub we got to develop against was made in C# and returned only dummy answers. The web service in the customer environment actually connected to a COM object. The first communication with the COM object after a longer wait took almost a minute.

Good for me that the third party developers left the source code on the customer servers...