generating ASP.NET SOAP faults

I have been hacking around today using ASP.NET to create a web service (basically updating an existing ASP HTTP GET based credit card processing service).

I have run into a number of problems:

• I can’t specify that parameters are optional.
• I can’t generate a SOAP Fault.

I don’t think there is a solution to the former but I have discovered my problem with the latter.

I now know that it is trivial to generate a SOAP Fault with .Net by throwing a SoapException.

I spent an hour trying to generate a SOAP Fault while using the GET request. During lunch I realized that I was not sending a SOAP request so I should not expect a SOAP response.

So, I needed a quick way to send a SOAP request and see the result.

curl works well for this task:

curl -d @- -H "Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8" "SOAPAction: \"http://missouri.edu/iats/ecommerce/\"" http://dev_server.missouri.edu/application/service.asmx

Note: You will need to change the charset and SOAPAction.

This causes curl to read the SOAP request from stdin.

The result returned now contains a SOAP fault (caused by the thrown SoapException).