What does suds mean by "<faultcode/> not mapped to message part"?

Question

I'm using suds for the first time and trying to communicate with a server hosted by an external company. When I call a method on the server I get this XML back.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<soap:Envelope 
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
    xmlns:soapenc="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" 
    xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" 
    soap:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" 
    xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
  <soap:Body>
    <soap:Fault>
      <faultcode>soap:Server</faultcode>

      <faultstring>Can't use string ("") as an ARRAY ref while "strict refs" in use at /vindicia/site_perl/Vindicia/Soap/DocLitUtils.pm line 130.
</faultstring>
    </soap:Fault>
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

The exception thrown is this:

  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\suds-0.4-py2.6.egg\suds\client.py", line 538, in __call__
    return client.invoke(args, kwargs)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\suds-0.4-py2.6.egg\suds\client.py", line 602, in invoke
    result = self.send(msg)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\suds-0.4-py2.6.egg\suds\client.py", line 634, in send
    result = self.succeeded(binding, reply.message)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\suds-0.4-py2.6.egg\suds\client.py", line 669, in succeeded
    r, p = binding.get_reply(self.method, reply)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\suds-0.4-py2.6.egg\suds\bindings\binding.py", line 157, in get_reply
    result = self.replycomposite(rtypes, nodes)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\suds-0.4-py2.6.egg\suds\bindings\binding.py", line 227, in replycomposite
    raise Exception(' not mapped to message part' % tag)
Exception: 'faultcode' not mapped to message part

Any idea why suds is throwing the exception? Any thoughts on how it could be fixed?

Answer 1

I had a similar issue where the call was successful, and suds crashed on parsing the response from the client. The workaround I used was to use the suds option to return raw XML and then use BeautifulSoup to parse the response.

Example:

client = Client(url)
client.set_options(retxml=True)
soapresp_raw_xml = client.service.submit_func(data)
soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(soapresp_raw_xml)
value_i_want = soup.find('ns:NewSRId')

Answer 2

Already answered here: What does suds mean by "<faultcode/> not mapped to message part"?

This exception actually means that the answer from SOAP-service contains tag <faultcode>, which doesn't exist in the WSDL-scheme of the service.

Keep in mind that suds library caches the WSDL-scheme, that is why the problem may occur if the WSDL-scheme was changed recently. Then the answers match the new scheme, but are verified by the suds-client with the old one. In this case rm /tmp/suds/* will help you.