How do I fix a .NET Webservice timeout causing a UnsupportedMediaException in a Java client?

Question

I currently have a .net SOAP web service with a timeout on the request that I set using

Server.ScriptTimeout = TIME_OUT;

I then have java client calling said web service. However when the timeout is reached I get this exception:

Exception in thread "Thread-9" com.sun.xml.ws.server.UnsupportedMediaException: Unsupported Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Supported ones are: [text/xml]

What is happening is that the web service returns an html error page with the http timeout code (503 I think?), which my Java code (generated using WSDLimport) doesn't expect.

Now I could catch the error UnsupportedMediaException on the client and attempt to translate it into something more meaningful, but I would prefer to send out a more specific timeout exception on the web service side. Is there anyway in a .net web service to send out a better exception when a timeout occurs, or any other way to handle this situation better?

EDIT:
I am using the WSDLImport from the glassfish 2 distribution.

Answer 1

You can make your webservice asynchronous. Then start a timer with your timeout in the BeginMyMethod, and throw custom exception in your EndMyMethod method. It will be wrapped in SOAP exception and sent to the client as such.

Answer 2

This is a known issue with Sun's JAX-WS stack.

For reference, the HTTP 500 code actually means that the server had an Internal Server Error. I'm not sure why .NET sends that rather than HTTP 503 Service Unavailable.