Web Service exception

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Mike Z - 23 Dec 2004 21:57 GMT

I have a web service, using wse2, sp2, that throws an exception:

Client found response content type of 'text/html; charset=utf-8', but
expected 'text/xml'.

The web service takes 2 string parameters and a byte array. It returns a
string.

It works in a different environment and has worked just fine in this
environment until just the other day.

When I got this error beofre during development, a simple rebuild of the web
service seemed to fix it (for unknown reasons!).

Is this a configuration issue on the web server, an issue with the
web.config file, a property setting of the web service proxy object or the
soap context in the web service?

I have seen very little about this particular error and none of the
suggestions I've seen thus far have helped.

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Ravi Singh (UCSD) - 24 Dec 2004 04:05 GMT

Hey Mike

I would suggest you first check the namespaces in the refrences.cs,
open the refrences.cs and readd the webservice. Additionally when you
add the webservice, ensure that you are at

http://localhost/SM/SM.asmx?wsdl and not
http://localhost/SM/SM.asmx
check this is so in the web.config file.

Hope this helps

-Ravi Singh

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Mike Z - 27 Dec 2004 22:29 GMT

Thanks.

I re-added the web service. No help.

It may help to know that I am accessing the web service via a Windows
control hosted in IE.

In it, I dynamically set the web service url via a public property. Could
this problem be related to a difference in the build between when I added the
web service with a local reference and the build on the web service in our
test environment?

It didn't seem to matter before this. In fact, it was working just fine in
our test environment last week, but this morning crapped out with no known
changes.

It seems possible that there's an error being hidden by the html response,
but because the client expects xml, it hides it with another error.

Is there somewhere I need to explicitly set the response content type,
possibly as an attribute or a web.config entry?

> Hey Mike
>
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
>
> -Ravi Singh

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Christoph Schittko [MVP] - 29 Dec 2004 03:52 GMT

Mike,

Your best bet is to get to the text of the error message. Since it's
html formatted it should be easy to read. If the returned error message
is the html error message from ASP.NET then it means something isn't set
up correctly at your web server.

Have you tried putting a tracing tool like tcpTrace [0] between your
user control and your web service? Since you mentioned that you are
reading the URL from a config file it should be easy for you to point
the client to the trace tool. The tool will then reveal the HTML
response of the server and get you on your way to troubleshoot the
problem. Note that you have to remove the trace tool once you fixed your
problems because WSE takes offense at the URL in the HTTP header not
matching the <To> SOAP header [1].

HTH,
Christoph Schittko
MVP XML
http://weblogs.asp.net/cschittko

[0] http://www.pocketsoap.com/tcptrace/
[1] http://weblogs.asp.net/cschittko/archive/2004/05/24/140906.aspx

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Z [mailto:MikeZ@discussions.microsoft.com]
[quoted text clipped - 40 lines]
> >
> > -Ravi Singh

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Mike Z - 29 Dec 2004 21:27 GMT

Thank you for the help.

This is what it turned out to be:

The html response occurred because my web service threw an unhandled
exception. Not good! And because (I guess) it's hosted by IIS, IIS decided
to return the error as HTML, as is the usual.

I finally uncovered the original exception, re-coded to handle ALL exceptions
(I actually caused the exception in an exception handler!), and
now everything is good in web services land.

Thanks again for your help.

> Mike,
>
[quoted text clipped - 71 lines]
> > >
> > > -Ravi Singh

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