Steve Hebert's Development Blog

Steve's Blog - From .Net to dotMath and everything in between.

November 2007 - Posts

Manually Mapping WSDL soap:address location on the fly

.Net does a nice job of sensing the underlying protocol when generating WSDL. For instance, if I run a service as "myService" on SSL, the underlying WSDL is wired to contain the <soap:address> location mapped to "https://..." instead of "http://..." However there are times when this sensing is not enough. A good relational setup between your load-balancer/encryptor setup should limit the change need to http->https, but this implementation also offers other flexibility as well. I just can't think of a good use-case right now.

When running with a front-end encryption appliance for offloading the cpu cost of SSL, the webservers themselves typically run on the http/port 80/non-encrypted protocol. Since .Net senses this, the WSDL is generated with "http://" prefixes in the soap:address which is incorrect for consumers of the service.

Handling this took a bunch of digging and feels extremely hack-ish. But it's a necessity in this scenario. To accomplish this task take the following steps:

Derive a class from SoapExtensionReflector that overrides the ReflectMethod().
Handle the remapping in the ReflectMethod() of the class created above.
Reference your new class under the webServices/soapExtensionReflectorTypes in web.config.

Here is a sample of the derived class:

    public class SoapAddressReflector : SoapExtensionReflector
    {
        public override void ReflectMethod()
        {
            ServiceDescription sd = ReflectionContext.ServiceDescription;

            foreach (Service service in sd.Services)
            {
                foreach( Port port in service.Ports)
                {
                    foreach (ServiceDescriptionFormatExtension extension in port.Extensions)
                    {

                        SoapAddressBinding address = (SoapAddressBinding)extension;
                        address.Location = RemapHttpReferencesToHttps(address.Location);
                    }
                }
            }
        }

        private string RemapHttpReferencesToHttps( string location )
        {
                return location.Replace("http:", "https:");
        }
    }
}

Here is the code to add to the web.config file:

For a bogus webservice named "myService" running server-native on http, the modified wsdl appears as follows:

- <wsdl:service name="myService">