Tom, Thanks for the comprehensive reply. The RPC binding for "wrapped" style services provided by Axis is excellent, but as expected, I have more questions and comments! ;-)
> > Hi Tim, > > The "wrapped" style indicates a particular style of doing document/literal that emulates RPC. This sounds a bit strange, but the best example of this is Microsoft .NET web services. For document style, each message part is an element in the request. For a wrapped style service, there is only a single message part, and its name is "parameters". This part is defined to be an element, who's name is the same as the operation name. This element then contains the parameters to the operation; the parameters are wrapped in an element. > I already understood why the "wrapped" style was needed, and now understand how its use is instigated... Thanks! Are you aware of any other vendors that use the "wrapped" style? Don't you think that using a part name (and the fact that there is only one) as a means of discriminating between "document" and "wrapped" is fairly delicate? I appreciate that this might be pedantry, but what if I wanted "document", not "wrapped" and named the single part "parameters"? This leads me to a slightly deeper question (which is connected, however tenuous the link may seem at first), which has likely been debated before, so I apologise if this is ground already covered: Microsoft obviously use document style for the majority (all?) of there services. This means that the data in the SOAP packets which they send is untyped on the wire, putting the emphasis on the framework to marshall/unmarshall based on the contract (WSDL), whether statically or dynamically. I guess the question is, why bother to encode (using SOAP section 5 rules)? Surely a combination of document style and XML schema (which is also a means of describing serialisation/deserialisation rules for XML) is sufficient for all cases? Thoughts? Tim
