.Net - Consuming webservice without WSDL

Question

We have a new accounting system that provides webservice interface to external clients. I want to access one of the interfaces but there's no WSDL so i created the request through the use of HttpWebRequest and it works fine.

However to ease the creation of the requests and parsing of the response i would like to create some kind of automapping function. I have the request and response structure in an XSD file. Any ideas?

Request creation:

public void SendRequest()
{
    HttpWebRequest request = CreateWebRequest();
    XmlDocument soapEnvelopeXml = new XmlDocument();
    soapEnvelopeXml.LoadXml(@"<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""utf-8""?>
        <soap:Envelope xmlns:soap=""http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"">
        <soap:Body xmlns:xsi=""http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"" xmlns:xsd=""http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"">

            ++ structure type inserted here ++   

        </soap:Body>
        </soap:Envelope>");

    using (Stream stream = request.GetRequestStream())
    {
        soapEnvelopeXml.Save(stream);
    }

    using (WebResponse response = request.GetResponse())
    {
        using (StreamReader rd = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
        {
            string soapResult = rd.ReadToEnd();
            Console.WriteLine(soapResult);
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Well, if you really have no way of getting hold of a proper WSDL file but have XSD:s you could probably use the xsd.exe tool to create classes that map to your request and response types.

Something like this (run this in a Visual Studio Command Prompt)

xsd.exe TheRequest.xsd /c /n:Your.Namespace
xsd.exe TheResponse.xsd /c /n:Your.Namespace

But really, try your best to find that WSDL, it will make your life a lot easier..