SOAP Action WSDL

Question

Hi all,

I'm trying to implement a client for National Rail Enquiries' SOAP Service (http://www.livedepartureboards.co.uk/ldbws/).

I stick the WSDL (http://realtime.nationalrail.co.uk/ldbws/wsdl.aspx) into http://soapclient.com/soaptest.html, but I get back the error message "Unable to handle request without a valid action parameter. Please supply a valid soap action."; what on earth should the action be?

Thanks, Stewart

edit:

I just used soapclient.com as a quick example. In my software, I send the following XML; I still get that I'm missing an action.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/" xmlns:tns="http://thalesgroup.com/RTTI/2008-02-20/ldb/" xmlns:soap12="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap12/" xmlns:ldbt2="http://thalesgroup.com/RTTI/2008-02-20/ldb/types" xmlns:ldbt="http://thalesgroup.com/RTTI/2007-10-10/ldb/types" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" xmlns:ct="http://thalesgroup.com/RTTI/2007-10-10/ldb/commontypes" >
 <SOAP-ENV:Body>
  <ldbt2:GetDepartureBoardRequest xmlns:ldbt2="http://thalesgroup.com/RTTI/2008-02-20/ldb/" >
   <ldbt2:numRows>5</ldbt2:numRows>
   <ldbt2:crs>WAT</ldbt2:crs>
   <ldbt2:filterCrs>GLD</ldbt2:filterCrs>
   <ldbt2:filterType>to</ldbt2:filterType>
   <ldbt2:timeOffset>0</ldbt2:timeOffset>
  </ldbt2:GetDepartureBoardRequest>
 </SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

Answer 1

If its a SOAP 1.1 service then you will also need to include a SOAPAction HTTP header field:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508/#_Toc478383528

Answer 2

I have come across exactly the same problem when trying to write a client for the National Rail SOAP service with Perl.

The problem was caused because the Perl module that I'm using 'SOAP::Lite' inserts a '#' in the SOAPAction header ...

SOAPAction: "http://thalesgroup.com/RTTI/2008-02-20/ldb/#GetDepartureBoard"

This is not interpreted correctly by .NET servers. I found this our from Example 3-19 on the following page: http://oreilly.com/catalog/progwebsoap/chapter/ch03.html . The solution was given below in section 3-20, namely you need to explicitly specify the format of the header with the 'on_action' method.

print SOAP::Lite
  -> uri('urn:Example1')
  -> on_action(sub{sprintf '%s/%s', @_ })
  -> proxy('http://localhost:8080/helloworld/example1.asmx')
  -> sayHello($name)
  -> result . "\n\n";

My guess is that soapclient.com is using SOAP::Lite behind the scenes and so are hitting the same problem when talking to National Rail.

The solution is to write your own client so that you have control over the format of the SOAPAction header ... but you've probably done that already.

Richard