SOAP Faults

Before concluding our discussion on web services and the associated concepts, we should look at the fault handling mechanism of web services. Faults can be returned by web services due to various reasons. For example, if the request message does not conform to the XML schema of web service, the service responds back with a SOAP Fault. The SOAP Fault element is used to carry such faults occurred during web service communication. This element must be included inside body of a SOAP message. A typical SOAP 1.1 Fault message consists of the following child elements:

In the case of SOAP v1.2 messaging, faultcode is renamed to Code and faultstring is renamed to Reason. In addition to that, a SOAP v1.2 Fault message can include the optional child elements, Node, Role, and Detail. A detailed explanation of SOAP 1.1 Faults can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508/#_Toc478383507. SOAP 1.2 Faults are explained in detail at http://www.w3.org/TR/soap12-part1/#soapfault.