ASP.NET WebAPI + Soap

Question

Does WebAPI support SOAP? I\'m trying to write a SOAP Server in MVC4 and whilst I can do it in WCF it seems that WebAPI is replacing this but I see no ways to utilize SOAP

Answer 1

It is not like Wed API supports SOAP but due to SOAP is just a standard that uses XML and it travels throw HTTP you can use Web API to expose a POST Service to read the XML and find the nodes you need using XPath and then Deserialize the nodes to objects.

First, you need to add XML support to the ConfigureServices

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
    {

        services.AddMvc()
            .SetCompatibilityVersion(CompatibilityVersion.Version_2_1)
            .AddXmlSerializerFormatters();
    }

Then in your controller, you just need to add a method that receives an XMLDocument and with XPath search for the node you are interested (Basically removing the soap envelope, the header, the body) and then you can deserialize the object. In my case, I add the service reference using the WSDL and with that, I deserialize the object.

[HttpPost("reservationxml")]
    public void CreateReservationFromTSW(XmlDocument soapCreateReservationRq)
    {
        XmlNamespaceManager nsmgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(soapCreateReservationRq.NameTable);
        nsmgr.AddNamespace("r", "http://soa.company.com/ReservationEnt");
        nsmgr.AddNamespace("s", "http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope");

        XmlNodeList xmlNodeList = soapCreateReservationRq.SelectNodes("s:Envelope/s:Body/r:CreateReservationRq",nsmgr);
        XmlNode xmlnode = xmlNodeList[0];
        XmlSerializer serial = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ServiceReference1.CreateReservationRqType));
        ServiceReference1.CreateReservationRqType rq = (ServiceReference1.CreateReservationRqType)serial.Deserialize(new XmlNodeReader(xmlnode));


    }

As you can see in the next image the service that tries to consume your service uses a Request Method POST with the Accept-Encoding: gzip. That is why you can expose a Web API that can be consumed for a SOAP service.