SOAP HTTP Binding
The HTTP Protocol
HTTP communicates over TCP/IP. An HTTP client connects to an HTTP server
using TCP. After establishing a connection, the client can send an HTTP request
message to the server:
POST /item HTTP/1.1
Host: 189.123.345.239
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Length: 200
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The server then processes the request and sends an HTTP response back to the
client. The response contains a status code that indicates the status of the
request:
200 OK
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Length: 200
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In the example above, the server returned a status code of 200. This is the standard
success code for HTTP.
If the server could not decode the request, it
could have returned something like this:
400 Bad Request
Content-Length: 0
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SOAP HTTP Binding
A SOAP method is an HTTP request/response that complies with the SOAP
encoding rules.
HTTP + XML = SOAP
A SOAP request could be an HTTP POST or an HTTP GET request.
The HTTP POST request specifies at least two
HTTP headers: Content-Type and Content-Length.
Content-Type
The Content-Type header for a SOAP request and
response defines the MIME type for the message and the
character encoding (optional) used for the XML body of the request or response.
Syntax
Content-Type: MIMEType; charset=character-encoding
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Example
POST /item HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8
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Content-Length
The Content-Length header for a SOAP request and
response specifies the number of bytes in the body of the request or response.
Syntax
Example
POST /item HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 250
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