How to access SOAP 1.1 fault detail from WCF client (no fault contract)

Question

I'm accessing a SOAP 1.1 web service, and it's returning a fault. The web service does not define any fault contract in the WSDL as far as I can see. My WCF client maps the fault to a FaultException (rather than a FaultException<T>). This all makes sense. The problem is that the service is returning some useful diagnostic information in the detail element of the fault, which I'd like to access so that I can dump it to a trace log. It seems that FaultException does not provide any access to the detail element, presumably because without a fault contract it doesn't know what is in there.

But I don't need to deserialize the detail XML - just the raw XML as a string will do fine for diagnostic purposes.

Is there any way to get access to the detail XML from a WCF client, in this scenario?

Answer 1

As detailed here: http://www.theruntime.com/blogs/jacob/archive/2008/01/28/getting-at-the-details.aspx

you can use this workaround to obtain the details:

} catch (FaultException soapEx)
{    
    MessageFault mf = soapEx.CreateMessageFault();    
    if (mf.HasDetail)
    {    
        XmlDictionaryReader reader = mf.GetReaderAtDetailContents();    
        ...    
    }    
}