What exception is thrown if a web service I'm using times out?

Question

I'm calling a .NET 2.0 web service within my existing .NET 2.0 web service. I would like to know what exception is thrown from the web method if a timeout happens. I have set the web service timeout to some lower value than the default 90 seconds and I want to add business logic if timeout happens.

Is [System.Net.WebException][1] the exception I should be looking at?

Answer 1

You should be looking for a TimeoutException:

The exception that is thrown when the time allotted for a process or operation has expired.

Answer 2

This kind of depends on which "version" of web services you are using.

Using WCF, you will actually get a TimeoutException. You should generally also handle CommunicationException if you are attempting to handle timeouts. Sometimes I've also seen FaultException, although that technically shouldn't happen (but it does anyway once in a while). FaultException is a descendant of CommunicationException so you don't need to handle it separately, it's just useful to know that it might occur.

In ASMX, you will usually get a wrapped SoapException for which you need to check the InnerException property to see what really went wrong.

Using WSE, you'll see yet another exception, ResponseProcessingException, for which again you must check the InnerException for details.