Developing Enterprise Web Services: An Architect's Guide

Using Alternative SOAP Encodings

Of course some applications already deal with XML natively, and there are currently XML-based vocabularies in use today supporting a plethora of B2B applications. SOAP-based messaging can take advantage of the pre-existence of schemas to craft message exchanges that compliment existing systems using so-called document-style SOAP.

The way in which alternative SOAP encodings are handled is straightforward. Instead of encoding header or body content according to the SOAP Data Model, we simply encode according to the rules and constraints of our data model and schema. In essence, we can just slide our own XML documents into a SOAP message, providing we remember to specify the encodingStyle attribute (and of course ...