Publishing Web Services with SOAP Headers

You add SOAP headers to your Web services when you run the BizTalk Web Services Publishing Wizard. When you publish a Web service that supports SOAP headers, the headers become available to orchestrations and pipeline components as context properties that contain string representations of the SOAP headers.

Defined SOAP headers

When you add a defined SOAP header using the wizard, the wizard creates a context property with a name that corresponds to the root element of the SOAP header. All defined SOAP header context properties have the namespace http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/SOAPHeader. When the SOAP adapter converts the SOAP request to a BizTalk message, it creates one SOAP header context property.

The following example shows a simple SOAP request:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>  
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">  
       <soap:Header>  
             <OrigDest xmlns="http://SOAPHeaderWS.ItemAvailability">  
                    <Origination>Work</Origination>  
                    <Destination>Home</Destination>  
             </OrigDest>  
       </soap:Header>  
       <soap:Body>  
  
       </soap:Body>  
</soap:Envelope>  

For the simple SOAP request, the SOAP adapter created a BizTalk message with one SOAP header context property OrigDest and the string.

The following example shows the string created by the SOAP adapter:

"<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><OrigDest xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://SOAPHeaderSchemas.OrigDestSOAPHeader"><Origination xmlns="">Home</Origination><Destination xmlns="">Work</Destination> </OrigDest>"  

Unknown SOAP headers

If you choose to support unknown SOAP headers in the wizard, the wizard creates a context property with the name UnknownHeaders and the namespace http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/soap-properties. The UnknownHeaders context property contains all of the received unknown SOAP headers.

For example, if you receive an unknown SOAP header with the root element name, CustomerGroup, the UnknownHeaders context property contains the string:

"<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><UnknownHeaders><CustomerGroup xmlns="http://SOAPHeaderWS/CustomerGroup"><Id xmlns="">My Customer</Id>  
</CustomerGroup></UnknownHeaders>"  

For more information about adding defined SOAP headers or supporting unknown SOAP headers, see Publishing an Orchestration as a Web Service. Also see Publishing Schemas as a Web Service.

See Also

SOAP Headers with Published Web Services