.NET Soap Client WSDL with no defined methods

Question

I've hit the internet pretty hard for this one over the past couple of weeks. I haven't used SOAP in a very long time and last I did all my wsdl service references worked. So here's the problem. I try to generate a service reference from the provided online wsdl (java based JAX-WS I think). This service does not allow the GET verb for the metadata so it fails there. I then downloaded the wsdl and fixed the directory issues pointed it at the right xsd's and viola it worked, however there's no methods to be found in this service, I'm supposed to just post a specific soap xml document to a url. The kicker here is I need to use the provided X509 certificate to sign the content and append a header to said xml using ws-security. Has anyone ever had an issue with adding service references or web references that don't have methods to attach to?

Answer 1

Some real-world "SOAP" services and service/client mixes necessitate cobbling together integration strategies.

"We publish our service, request, and response descriptions with WSDL...but provide no service operations" is classic unfortunately. I call these single-implicit-operation services.

Consider using HttpClient to POST your text/xml content to the service. Answers to another SO question may be a good place to start.

When you turn to signing the request content, check out this SO question about signing XML with an X.509 cert.

For the WS-Security header check out yet another SO question about adding a WS-Security header to a SOAP request that may help.