I was and am in a similar position. Here is where we are and some issues that we have faced.
We use SOAP RPC passing a single parameter of XML DOM Element with an encoding style of Literal XML to a catch-all SOAP Service. In a way we kind of built our own SOAP-like server on top of SOAP, because our XML Request message include attributes to indicate the operation to invoke, username/password and also encapsulates additional XML Elements to be used as parameters to that operation. This was all working real well with Apache and MSSoap client. Then we had a client that was written in Perl and was using SOAP::Lite. The SOAP Lite implementation doesn't understand XML Literal encoding or is buggy when encoding in XML Literal. To solve this problem, we had to create a second SOAP Service that accepts the XML Request Message as a single String parameter. This SOAP Service just gets a DOM Factory and turns the String into a DOM Element and passes it along as if it came in that way. We haven't gone live with this yet, but so far it looks like it is going to work well. There may be some formatting issues that come up with the SOAP encoding of Strings. The next problem was we wanted to create WSDL files for our Web Services. Because we only have one SOAP Service (2 if you count the one that accepts String), we found it difficult to write a WSDL file that would be of any use. Internally to our system we have several Web Services but there is only one SOAP Service that is accepting XML Request messages. We can create a WSDL file that defines our one SOAP service and it's one XML parameter, but this doesn't provide many of the benefits of WSDL, such as code generation, dynamic binding, etc. I have been thinking about breaking out each Web Service into individual SOAP services so we can take advantage of WSDL, but it would be a ton of more work. The parameters to our Web Services are very complex and best modeled in XML or a Class of some type. So far, my research has lead me to believe that it will be very difficult to encode these in SOAP/WSDL types. Good Luck! -----Original Message----- From: P Sreenivasa Rao [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2001 2:30 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Doubt on Web Services -SOAP Hi all, In our application,we are using XML messages as requests and responses and now we want to implement the communication between some components with Web Sevices. I want to know whether I've to send the whole XML request in the SOAP request and same in the case of XML response also.Generally we'll format a SOAP request with the service to be called and with the required parameters. But here I want to send the whole XML request/response as a SOAP request/response. Is there any way to do that. I may use Apache web server for deploying some web services(for one node communication) and Weblogic 6.1 webservices as another node(or same apache web server also) I'd appreciate if anybody is working with webservices on Weblogic 6.1 Application server . Thanks in advance. With best regards, Sreenivas P, CMC Ltd, India
