Server did not recognize the value of HTTP Header SOAPAction

Question

The source of the next part of this post is:

http://bluebones.net/2003/07/server-did-not-recognize-http-header-soapaction/

(since the OP didn't want to give attribution, and thanks to Peter)

Please note that bakert is the original author of the text, not the OP.

---

Seeing as nowhere on the internet can I find an explanation of this error I thought I’d share the fruits of my long search for this bug.

It means (at least in my case) that you are accessing a web service with SOAP and passing a SOAPAction parameter in the HTTP request that does not match what the service is expecting.

I got in a pickle because we moved a web service from one server to another and thus I changed the “namespace” (don’t get confused between web service namespaces and .net namespaces) in the calling C# file to match the new server. But the server doesn’t care about the actual web reality of http://yournamespace.com/blah it only cares that you send it what you have said you are expecting on the server. It doesn’t care if there’s actually anything there or not.

So basically the web service was moved from http://foo.com/servicename to http://bar.com/servicename but the “namespace” of the web service stayed as http://foo.com/servicename because no one changed it.

And that only took about 4 hours to work out!

If you’re having a similar problem but can’t work what I’m saying here, feel free to mail me on [email protected] – I wouldn’t wish my four hours on anyone!

While calling the .asmx / wcf web service please take care of below points:

1. The namespace is case sensitive,the SOAP request MUST be sent with the same namespace with which the WebService is declared.

e.g. For the WebService declared as below

[WebService(Namespace = "http://MyDomain.com/TestService")] 
public class FooClass : System.Web.Services.WebService 
{
   [WebMethod]   
    public bool Foo( string name)    
     {

      ...... 
     }

 }

The SOAP request must maintain the same case for namespace while calling.Sometime we overlook the case sensitivity.

<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
  <soap:Body>
     <Foo xmlns="http://MyDomain.com/TestService">
     <name>string</name>      
     </Foo>
  </soap:Body> 
</soap:Envelope>

2. The namespace need not be same as hosted url of the service.The namespace can be any string.

e.g. Above service may be hosted at http://84.23.9.65/MyTestService , but still while invoking the Web Service from client the namespace should be the same which the serice class is having i.e.http://MyDomain.com/TestService

I agree with Sam in that the SOAP definition does not match what is expected. Here is just ONE solution it could be, I had to manually figure this error for myself:

My problem was that I changed the name of the web method but did not change the "MessageName" in the metadata tag.

[WebMethod(MessageName = "foo")]
public string bar()
{

}

It should be

[WebMethod(MessageName = "foo")]
public string foo()
{

}

hope that helps someone

I've decided to post my own answer here because I've lost a few hours on this and I think that, although the accepted answer is very good and pointed me in the right direction (yes, it got a voteup), it was not detailed enough to explain what was wrong with my application, at least in my case.

I'm running a BPEL module in OpenESB 2.2 and the Test Case of my Composite Application was failing with the following error:

Caused by: System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: Server did not recognize the value of HTTP Header SOAPAction: .

After doing some research I've noticed that the external WSDL has all the clues we need to fix this problem, e.g., I'm using the following web service to validate a credit card number through a orchestration of Web Services: http://www.webservicex.net/CreditCard.asmx?WSDL

If you check the <wsdl:operation elements you will see that it clearly states the soapAction for that operation:

<wsdl:binding name="CCCheckerSoap" type="tns:CCCheckerSoap">
  <soap:binding transport="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http"/>
  <wsdl:operation name="ValidateCardNumber">
    <soap:operation soapAction="http://www.webservicex.net/ValidateCardNumber" style="document"/>
    <wsdl:input>
  <soap:body use="literal"/>
</wsdl:input>
...

But, once you create the Composite Application and build the project with the BPEL that invokes this external WSDL service, for some reason (bug?), the XML of the Composite Application Service Assembly (CASA) binding is generated with an empty soapAction parameter:

<binding name="casaBinding1" type="ns:CCCheckerSoap">
        <soap:binding style="document" transport="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http"/>
        <operation name="ValidateCardNumber">
            <soap:operation soapAction="" style="document"/>
            <input>
                <soap:body use="literal"/>
            </input>

Once you copy the proper soapAction (http://www.webservicex.net/ValidateCardNumber) into this parameter, the application's Test Case will correctly and return the expected Soap response.

<soap:operation soapAction="http://www.webservicex.net/ValidateCardNumber" style="document"/>

So, it's a more specific solution that I decided to document based on the information found in this blog post: http://bluebones.net/2003/07/server-did-not-recognize-http-header-soapaction/.

It means (at least in my case) that you are accessing a web service with SOAP and passing a SOAPAction parameter in the HTTP request that does not match what the service is expecting.

I had same problem, it fixed after some checking:

<< Target WebService Exists but called method's not eXXXists. >>

my local service contain methods but target server(connecting server) does not contain specified called method.

Check your program scenario again...

Just to help someone on this problem, after an afternoon of debug, the problem was that the web service was developed with framework 4.5 and the call from android must be done with SoapEnvelope.VER12 and not with SoapEnvelope.VER11

I had similar issue. To debug the problem, I've run Wireshark and capture request generated by my code. Then I used XML Spy trial to create a SOAP request (assuming you have WSDL) and compared those two.

This should give you a hint what goes wrong.