WCF Method is returning xml fragment but no xml UTF-8 header

Question

My method does not return the header, just the root element xml.

internal Message CreateReturnMessage(string output, string contentType)
            {
                // create dictionaryReader for the Message
                byte[] resultBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(output);
                XmlDictionaryReader xdr = XmlDictionaryReader.CreateTextReader(resultBytes, 0, resultBytes.Length, Encoding.UTF8, XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas.Max, null);

                if (WebOperationContext.Current != null)
                    WebOperationContext.Current.OutgoingResponse.ContentType = contentType;

                // create Message
                return Message.CreateMessage(MessageVersion.None, "", xdr);
            }

However, the output I get is:

<Test>
   <Message>Hello World!</Message> 
</Test>

I would like the output to render as:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<Test>
   <Message>Hello World!</Message> 
</Test>

Answer 1

so assuming output param is coming in as...

<Test>
   <Message>Hello World!</Message> 
</Test>

What do you expect to happen? You aren't writing xml, just reading the output string through a reader. The reader class won't add anything to your fragment, it's a reader, not a writer.

You could so something like this instead...It will parse your output as xml and then you can add a declaration before giving it to the message.

var output = "<Test><Message>Hello World!</Message></Test>";
var xd = XDocument.Parse(output);
xd.Declaration = new XDeclaration("1.0", "utf-8", "yes");
return Message.CreateMessage(version, messageFault, xd.ToString());