Real World XML Web Services: For VB and VB .NET Developers

7.6. Communicating Errors

SOAP provides a standard mechanism for reporting error information using the <soap:Fault> element as discussed in Chapter 3. When using .NET, any exceptions not caught in the Web method get reported to the client as a <soap:Fault>. Similarly, .NET clients throw a SoapException whenever they receive a <soap:Fault>. In the simplest case, you can communicate errors from a service by throwing an exception, for example:

Throw New Exception("This is the error information")

For more sophisticated scenarios, you can send structured error information as XML elements inside <soap:Fault>. To do this, you create a new SoapException and pass it an array of XML elements that you want to send to the client. SoapException has six ...