Archived: SOAP 1.1 Request - Content-Length Too Large

This section provides a tutorial example of SOAP 1.1 request to use the GetSpeech Web service provided at xmlme.com. Communication hangs if Content-Length is larger than the number of bytes in the request content, because the server will wait forever for more data.

Note that the "GetSpeech" Web service provided by xmlme.com is no longer available.

In the previous tutorial, I was lazy and didn't want to count the number of bytes in XML message in my SOAP 1.1 request.

To count the number of bytes in XML message, I save it in a separate file, soap_1_1_GetSpeech.xml. The extra blank line at the end indicates that I have a new line (\n) after the soap:Envelope ending tag.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
  xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
  <soap:Body>
    <GetSpeech xmlns="http://xmlme.com/WebServices">
      <Request>To be, or not to be</Request>
    </GetSpeech>
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

I use Windows File Explorer to locate this file, right-mouse-click it, and select Properties from the pop up menu. The Properties dialog box says "Size: 384 bytes (384 bytes)" as shown in this picture:

SOAP 1.1 GetSpeech Request XML
SOAP 1.1 GetSpeech Request XML

Let's put the 384 as Content-Length in soap_1_1_GetSpeech.req:

POST /WSShakespeare.asmx HTTP/1.1
Host: www.xmlme.com
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 384
SOAPAction: "http://xmlme.com/WebServices/GetSpeech"

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
  xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
  <soap:Body>
    <GetSpeech xmlns="http://xmlme.com/WebServices">
      <Request>To be, or not to be</Request>
    </GetSpeech>
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

Now we are ready to try again:

herong> SocketRequestResponse.pl www.xmlme.com 80 \
   soap_1_1_GetSpeech.req soap_1_1.res

Terminating on signal SIGINT(2)

My SocketRequestResponse.pl hung for more than 5 minutes. I had to press Ctrl-C to terminate it. Why?

After some thinking and testing, I have a good guess on what happened here:

Now I learned that HTTP servers really respect the "Content-Length" header line in the request. I will fix my test program SocketRequestResponse.pl and try again in the next tutorial.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Introduction to Web Service

 Introduction to SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)

 SOAP Message Structure

 SOAP Message Transmission and Processing

 SOAP Data Model

 SOAP Encoding

 SOAP RPC Presentation

 SOAP Properties Model

 SOAP MEP (Message Exchange Patterns)

 SOAP HTTP Binding

 SOAP PHP Implementations

 PHP SOAP Extension Client Programs

 PHP SOAP Extension Server Programs

 PHP SOAP Web Service Example - getTemp

 SOAP Perl Implementations

 Perl SOAP::Lite - SOAP Server-Client Communication Module

 Perl Socket Test Program for HTTP and SOAP

 Perl SOAP::Lite for NumberToWords SOAP 1.1 Web Service

 Perl SOAP::Lite for SOAP 1.2 Web Services

 Perl SOAP::Lite for WSDL

 Python SOAP Client: Zeep

 SOAP Java Implementations

 Java Socket and HttpURLConnection for SOAP

 SAAJ - SOAP with Attachments API for Java

 SoapUI - SOAP Web Service Testing Tool

 WS-Security - SOAP Message Security Extension

 WS-Security X.509 Certificate Token

 Perl SOAP::Lite for GetSpeech SOAP 1.1 Web Service

 Perl SOAP::Lite 0.710 for SOAP 1.2 Web Services

 Perl SOAP::Lite 0.710 for WSDL

 Web Services and SOAP Terminology

Archived Tutorials

 Archived SOAP::Lite 0.55 in ActivePerl 5.8.7

 Archived: SOAP 1.1 Request - Content-Length Too Small

Archived: SOAP 1.1 Request - Content-Length Too Large

 Archived: SOAP 1.1 Request and Response of GetSpeech

 Archived: SOAP 1.2 Request and Response of GetSpeech

 Archived: Calling GetSpeech SOAP 1.1 with SAAJ

 Archived: Calling GetSpeech SOAP 1.2 with SAAJ

 References

 Full Version in PDF/EPUB