How to pass “Null” (a real surname!) to a SOAP web service in ActionScript 3

Question

We have an employee whose surname is Null. Our employee lookup application is killed when that last name is used as the search term (which happens to be quite often now). Th

Answer 1

Well, I guess that Flex' implementation of the SOAP Encoder seems to serialize null values incorrectly. Serializing them as a String Null doesn't seem to be a good solution. The formally correct version seems to be to pass a null value as:

So the value of "Null" would be nothing else than a valid string, which is exactly what you are looking for.

I guess getting this fixed in Apache Flex shouldn't be that hard to get done. I would recommend opening a Jira issue or to contact the guys of the apache-flex mailinglist. However this would only fix the client side. I can't say if ColdFusion will be able to work with null values encoded this way.

See also Radu Cotescu's blog post How to send null values in soapUI requests.