soapUI is an application that will let you fiddle around until you get the calls right.
I recently did exactly this. I wound up not only generating the SOAP envelope by hand but also the HTTP headers:
SOAPAction: "http://...//SubmitDataform
What is the action I am trying to do doing in the HTTP headers?
Anybody that tries to interface with a SOAP interface by writing envelopes by hand is wasting their time and half-implementing the (long, terrible, complicated, blah blah) spec.
Find a good toolkit. Yes, the protocol is way over engineered but good tools can and do abstract that all from you. For instance, PHP's standard library lets you plug in a WSDL URL and consume SOAP services in two lines of code. (And because it is a good toolkit, it lets you spit out all traffic with one debug flag, unlike whatever terrible thing the author of this article is using.)
Most of what people complain about in these comments would be moot with good tools. You would probably complain about REST if you didn't have curl or Firebug and had to telnet all your test calls--that's equivalent to what most people here seem to be doing.
The reason people are writing their own envelopes in cases (like I did also) is because the tooling is not delivering up to it's promises. (Let alone that the server might not even understand the two-line-code genertated nusoap reponse because he interpretes some ws-* rules about namespaces differently.
The conclusion is: nobody wants to write his/her own envelopes.
I don't know anything about .NET, but I wonder if there is something profoundly different that is going on behind the scenes, or does it just generate crufty WSDLs? Can anyone shine more light on this?
The going gets rough when people put half their strongly typed domain logic in the wsdl which has to be recereated on the other side. Hint: Collections != Arrays != Hashes
So, problaby not .NET but bloat related. Interoperability is a problem on all sides though.
I spent a few weeks trying to find a good toolkit for the big hairy nested ape of a WSDL I was trying to consume, and nothing could parse it properly and expose the methods in a sane manner.
I ended up doing just what the OP did - hand-crafted the request payloads in soapUI and turned them into templates that I could execute programmatically.
I really hate SOAP.
I'm investigating 3 different WSDL->JS libraries.
* Guru4 JavaSriptSOAPClient - Unmaintained since 2006
* Python wsdl2js - not widely tested or maintained
* Apache CXF wsdl2js - maintained, but doesn't seem to like the WSDL provided by my service provider.
Of the three, Apache CXF is the only one that looks promising, but fails to generate any JS. I'm trying to fix it, but I keep encountering more old-style web-services acronyms. All I want are so classes - maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I simply don't think it should be this hard.
If you're interested, the WSDL issues are detailed further in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4827467/understanding-apa...
Edit: I've found a maintained version of the Guru4 implementation at http://javascriptsoapclient.codeplex.com that I'm going to try.
Sure, if I'd write in Java (I ended up with Perl5, as - thanks to CPAN - it seemed the most suitable for the task), all this SOAP stuff would be as simple as several clicks in NetBeans or whatever-Java-people-are-using. But I didn't knew Java enough to write everything I needed, I didn't like idea of Java SOAP-to-SomethingRESTful proxy, and I was quite scared of FactoryFactoryFactoryInterfaceActorProducerFactoryFactorySingleton libraries to dive into Java (yes, I know not all Java is Enterprise Quality, but system I had to interface with was extremly enterprisey).
Trying to generate code using a Java toolkit from an MS wsdl? 90% chances of failure. Same the other way around.
A protocol for interoperability that is vendor-specific? That's an oxymoron.
> WSDL
In the OPs defense, it should be pointed out that SOAPUI is a WSDL client.
You are vastly oversimplifying when you say "with REST you just have to figure out a URL". Try integrating with a service that takes only custom HTTP verbs with multipart/form-data but because there's no standard way to send an array in HTTP you have to append some parameter multiple times but in the right order. There's some vague attempt at using OAuth for authentication, but it doesn't work with any of the libraries you are used to. Oh, and the service returns a 503 some of the time, which (according to the rambling hacked up docs for this API) means you should retry your request in 10 seconds. No, it's not always trivial.
I thought it was discoverability which was SOAP's strong point, while ad-hoc solutions like REST which have the bonus of being much more lightweight/terse, lacks this feature.
As for non-standard query-format, with a good toolkit you point to the WSDL and you are done, all your RPC-calls pregenerated for you.
I know SOAP has some issues, that it's a verbose line-format and that recent WS*-additions add complexity faster than you can say "oh shit", but at its root, SOAP really isn't hard to work with if you have a decent toolkit.
If you are hand-rolling your SOAP-layer, you might as well start invoking your database trough telnet and handrolled protocol-code. It makes as much sense.
As to the existence of sufficiently good toolkits, that won't save you in the face of vendor bone-headedness. Talking to .NET from a Java stack is still problematic, where either toolkit on its own is apparently fine on its own territory. There's a particularly fine example in MS Exchange Web Services, where getting Java to talk to it over SOAP is so fiddly they're releasing a Java port of their managed API.
You have the SOAP messages which envelopes (sigh) yet another message-level architecture where every request, even at OO level means constructing request-objects with millions of sub-properties, all types fitting an abstract inheritance tree. Which ofcourse is also what you get returned after sending your request. So then you have to start analyzing your response object (again a message-object enveloped in a SOAP-message) and anaylze what class it actually is and the same for all subproperties.
I don't mind SOAP so much, but EWS can really go die in a fire. You can say whatever you want about SOAP in general, but EWS cannot really be used as an example of anything other than itself. I've never seen such a painful and convoluted solution anywhere else.
Even if SOAP had been ditched and the wire-format used had been some sort of RESTFul implementation, it would still be a clusterfuck to use. Blaming SOAP here is IMO a bit misdirected.