Are you saying that the payload must be a separate XML document with its own <?xml> header? Or is your requirement only that the payload contains an XML structure that conforms to the standard XML schema (an XML fragment)?
If you must send a separate document rather than a document fragment, then Sun's recommendations are accurate, although is the document includes the doctype declarations, then option #3 won't work. Option #1 will cause interoperability problems because the industry has not reached consensus on how to send SOAP attachments. .NET supports only DIME attachments, and a number of Java implementations (including Sun's JWSDP) support only MIME attachments. (Note that Axis supports both DIME and MIME.) Option #2 is probably your best bet. The XML document is serialized as a string and this value is then embedded in an element of type xsd:string. It's not passed as XML, so it doesn't impact the wellformed-ness of the SOAP message. Option #3 works only if you are sending an XML fragment rather than an XML document. If you can send an XML fragment, then you should actually import the document's schema into the WSDL. The message part can then be defined as the root element of the document. Anne -----Original Message----- From: Jason Nesbitt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 4:43 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Passing XML Documents I need to create a web service where the payload will be an industry standard xml document. What's the best way to have the client package the xml doc into the soap message? Sun says that there are three ways to do this. See http://java.sun.com/blueprints/guidelines/designing_webservices/html/webserv design8.html. 1. The xml doc could be sent as an attachment. 2. The message part could be definined as an xsd:String type. 3. The message part could be definined as an xsd:anyType The problem with option 1 above is that Sun says it's not very interoperable. I'm not sure why. I'm not sure if 2 and 3 would work because the documents being sent would likely have xml and doctype declarations (The document has a dtd). Obviously, these declarations are not elements and when embedded in a soap message would result in the message not being well formed xml. Would those declarations possibly be encoded? What would the difference be between xsd:String and xsd:anyType with the way the messages would look over the wire? Another option that has been discussed would be to skip using SOAP and just pass the xml doc as the payload of an http post. Might this be a better solution? Any opinions on the merits of this? Thanks for your input. Jason p.s. Anyone need a gmail account? I've got six left to give out.
