View raw XML request

Question

I am very new to WCF and SOAP messaging but I have managed to put together a reasonably good client which I am using to download news stories from a media organisation. I have generated proxy classes which obviously abstract a lot away and mean that I am basically just creating objects, calling methods and iterating through results.

My issue is that I have raw XML examples of what the calls to the web service should look like and I want to be able to "compare" these to the calls that I am making. Basically I need to ensure that the calls that I am making are the same as the example XML files for testing purposes.

Does what I am asking make sense or am I going about this the wrong way? Please let me know if there is any necessary information that I have left out, I could bang on for paragraphs but am not sure what information is relevant.

Answer 1

You can use WCF tracing to log the raw XML messages. The following is .config enables WCF tracing with raw message logging:

<configuration>
  <system.serviceModel>
    <diagnostics>
      <messageLogging maxMessagesToLog="30000"
              logEntireMessage="true"
              logMessagesAtServiceLevel="true"
              logMalformedMessages="true"
              logMessagesAtTransportLevel="true">
      </messageLogging>
    </diagnostics>
  </system.serviceModel>
  <system.diagnostics>
    <sources>
      <source name="System.IdentityModel" switchValue="Verbose" logKnownPii="true">
        <listeners>
          <add name="xml" />
        </listeners>
      </source>
      <!-- Log all messages in the 'Messages' tab of SvcTraceViewer. -->
      <source name="System.ServiceModel.MessageLogging">
        <listeners>
          <add name="xml" />
        </listeners>
      </source>
      <!-- ActivityTracing and propogateActivity are used to flesh out the 'Activities' tab in
           SvcTraceViewer to aid debugging. -->
      <source name="System.ServiceModel" switchValue="Error, ActivityTracing" propagateActivity="true">
        <listeners>
          <add name="xml" />
        </listeners>
      </source>
      <!-- This records Microsoft.IdentityModel generated traces, including exceptions thrown
           from the framework. -->
      <source name="Microsoft.IdentityModel" switchValue="Warning">
        <listeners>
          <add name="xml" />
        </listeners>
      </source>
    </sources>
    <sharedListeners>
      <add name="xml" type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener" initializeData="trace.e2e" />
    </sharedListeners>
    <trace autoflush="true" />
  </system.diagnostics>
</configuration>

You can read more about WCF Tracing from MSDN: Configuring Tracing.

Microsoft provides a Service Trace Viewer Tool to read .svclog files.

Make sure the path defined in initializeData is writable by your service.