Trouble Consuming Java Web Service with .NET Client

Question

WCF newbie here, I am attempting to make a .NET 4.0 client consume a web service hosted in JBOSS. I believe the results from the web service are being serialized using x-fire. The client side is using WCF to connect to the service. This in an internal web service that uses Ntlm to authenticate the caller.

I am able to add a service reference to my client, and call one of the methods on the server. I have determined that the request is being sent, and a response is indeed coming back. The problem is that the response is not in the traditional SOAP format, and I believe the standard WCF bindings are unable to interpret this. Here's some information on the app:

app.config

  <system.serviceModel>
    <bindings>
      <basicHttpBinding>
          <binding name="myBinding" >
            <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly">
              <transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm" proxyCredentialType="None"
                  realm="" />
              <message clientCredentialType="UserName" algorithmSuite="Default"  />
            </security>
          </binding>
        </basicHttpBinding>
    </bindings>
    <client>
      <endpoint address="http://server/services/WS" binding="basicHttpBinding"
          bindingConfiguration="myBinding" contract="myContract"
          name="myEndpoint" />
    </client>
  </system.serviceModel>

Request being sent to the server...

POST http://server/services/WS HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
SOAPAction: ""
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate,gzip, deflate,gzip, deflate
Authorization: NTLM
Host: server
Content-Length: 145

<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"><s:Body><getAppInfo xmlns="http://ws.application.com"/></s:Body></s:Envelope>

Response coming back from the server (pulled from fiddler)...

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2012 19:48:04 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.5; JBoss-5.0/JBossWeb-2.1
Set-Cookie: blah; Path=/
Content-Type: multipart/related; type="application/xop+xml"; start="<soap.xml@xfire.codehaus.org>"; start-info="text/xml";      boundary="----=_Part_14_20837339.1340048884628";charset=UTF-8


------=_Part_14_20837332219.1340048884628
Content-Type: application/xop+xml; charset=UTF-8; type="text/xml"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-ID: <soap.xml@xfire.codehaus.org>

<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"><soap:Body><getAppInfoResponse xmlns="http://ws.app.com"><out><apiVersion xmlns="http://dto.ws.app.com">55</apiVersion><dbBuildNumber xmlns="http://dto.ws.app.com">12312</dbBuildNumber><appBuildNumber xmlns="http://dto.ws.app.com" xsi:nil="true" /></out></getAppInfoResponse></soap:Body></soap:Envelope>
------=_Part_14_20837332219.1340048884628--

and the error message from the .net client is as follows...

The content type multipart/related; type="application/xop+xml"; start="<soap.xml@xfire.codehaus.org>"; start-info="text/xml";       boundary="----=_Part_14_20837332219.1340048884628";charset=UTF-8 of the response message does not match the content type of the binding (text/xml; charset=utf-8). If using a custom encoder, be sure that the IsContentTypeSupported method is implemented properly. The first 738 bytes of the response were: '

the rest of the exception just repeats the initial response from the server.

My guess is that I need to make a custom binding, or something like that. I've looked around for a good example on how to do this, but they all seem to leave something out that prevents me from connecting everything together. If I could get the custom binding working, my guess would be to parse the response, and pass everything in between the ------ lines to the WCF deserializer, since this is the actual soap response.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to do this, good examples to follow, or perhaps a different approach altogether?

BTW, the webservice is a black box, no coding changes can occur there.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Try changing your binding configuration to the following:

<binding name="myBinding" messageEncoding="Mtom">

As you can see the messageEncoding is set to Mtom which should take care of your issue since that is what the JBoss server is returning.

See MTOM for a detailed description of this encoding type.

Answer 2

Please leave out the Security stuff

<security mode="TransportCredentialOnly">
              <transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm" proxyCredentialType="None"
                  realm="" />
              <message clientCredentialType="UserName" algorithmSuite="Default"  />
            </security>

from your binding. Because your messages will be protected according to the setting, and since JBOSS dispatcher model is different from WCF dispatcher, so it could not decrypt your messages.