Debugging Web Service with SOAP Packet

Question

I have a web service that I created in C# and a test harness that was provided by my client. Unfortunately my web service doesn't seem to be parsing the objects created by the test harness. I believe the problem lies with serializing the soap packet.

Using TCPTrace I was able to get the soap packet passed to the web service but only on a remote machine so I can't debug it there. Is there a way of calling my local webservice with the soap packet generated rather than my current test harness where I manually create objects and call the web service through a web reference?

Thanks in advance

[edit] The machine that I got the soap packet was on a vm so I can't link it to my machine. I suppose I'm looking for a tool that I can paste the soap packet into and it will in turn call my web service

Answer 1

By default, .Net will not allow you to connect a packet analyzer like TCPTrace or Fiddler (which I prefer) to localhost or 127.0.0.1 connections (for reasons that I forget now..)

Best way would be to reference your web services via a full IP address or FQDN where possible. That will allow you to trace the calls in the tool of your choice.

Answer 2

A somewhat manual process would be to use the Poster add-in for Firefox. There is also a java utility called SoapUI that has some discovery based automated templates that you can then modify and run against your service.

Answer 3

Same as palehorse, use soapUI or directly the specific component for that feature: TCPMon.

Answer 4

Just did this the other day with TCPTrace on the local machine. I mapped the remote host in the hosts file to 127.0.0.1. Ran the local web server on 8080, TcpTrace on 80 pointing to 127.0.0.1:8080. Probably your issue is trying to run both at port 80 which won't work.