How can I call a SOAP Web Service without Adding Web Reference

Question

I require developing a .NET 4.5 Client for a SOAP based web service. The problem is the company who are developing these SOAP based services do not provide WSDLs. However they do provide the request response schemas (XSD files). Since there are no WSDLs I'm unable to add a web reference and get the client proxy code autogenerated.

Are there any .NET 4.5 libraries out there that I can use to make these SOAP base service calls? It needs to support SOAP 1.1 and SOAP attachements too.

Answer 1

If for some reason you don't want to create the WSDL file, the example below could be used to manually construct a SOAP HTTP request:

var url = Settings.Default.URL; //'Web service URL'
var action = Settings.Default.SOAPAction; //the SOAP method/action name

var soapEnvelopeXml = CreateSoapEnvelope();
var soapRequest = CreateSoapRequest(url, action);
InsertSoapEnvelopeIntoSoapRequest(soapEnvelopeXml, soapRequest);

using (var stringWriter = new StringWriter())
{
    using (var xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create(stringWriter))
    {
        soapEnvelopeXml.WriteTo(xmlWriter);
        xmlWriter.Flush();
    }
}

// begin async call to web request.
var asyncResult = soapRequest.BeginGetResponse(null, null);

// suspend this thread until call is complete. You might want to
// do something usefull here like update your UI.
var success = asyncResult.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5));

if (!success) return null;

// get the response from the completed web request.
using (var webResponse = soapRequest.EndGetResponse(asyncResult))
{
    string soapResult;
    var responseStream = webResponse.GetResponseStream();
    if (responseStream == null)
    {
        return null;
    }
    using (var reader = new StreamReader(responseStream))
    {
        soapResult = reader.ReadToEnd();
    }
    return soapResult;
}

private static HttpWebRequest CreateSoapRequest(string url, string action)
{
    var webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
    webRequest.Headers.Add("SOAPAction", action);
    webRequest.ContentType = "text/xml;charset=\"utf-8\"";
    webRequest.Accept = "text/xml";
    webRequest.Method = "POST";
    return webRequest;
}

private static XmlDocument CreateSoapEnvelope()
{
    var soapEnvelope = new XmlDocument();
    soapEnvelope.LoadXml(Settings.Default.SOAPEnvelope); //the SOAP envelope to send
    return soapEnvelope;
}

private static void InsertSoapEnvelopeIntoSoapRequest(XmlDocument soapEnvelopeXml, HttpWebRequest webRequest)
{
    using (Stream stream = webRequest.GetRequestStream())
    {
        soapEnvelopeXml.Save(stream);
    }
}