Removing sequence tag from SOAP WSDL Schema -- help please

[kevin]

Is that even possible?

I am creating a web service in .NET to expose some already created .NET
programs to other groups. One group is writing the client in PERL, and thus
wishes the wsdl schema to not be sequenced. (PERL hashes do not retain order
information) First, the w3 specs don't mention the sequence in any detail -
its just there in the examples, which makes me wonder if removing the
sequence tag is even supportable. Second, I can find nothing in the .NET
documentation that suggests how I would remove the sequence information, and
nothing in DefaultWsdlHelp Generator.aspx that even mentions sequence.

I suppose I could try generating the .asmx?WSDL, manually removing the
sequence tags, then having people point to it, but I am not sure that would
work.

Anyone have any ideas?

[Marvin Smit]

Hi,

Can i rephrase this question and post if back to you?

"Can you guys change the XSD spec so I can write a webservice which is
used by a perl implementation, which uses hashes and therefore cannot
maintain a sequence?"

The "sequence" is a composer. One of three possible;
- sequence
- choice
- all

It makes no sense removing the composer. If you do, the only thing
that might happen is that 'a default' is used. Which again would be
one of the three mentioned above.

My advise would be;

Get the "Perl" implementation to adhere to standards, not the other
way around.

Hope this helps,

Marvin Smit.
On Tue, 13 Sep 2005 06:56:03 -0700, "kevin"
<ke***@discussi ons.microsoft.c om> wrote:

Is that even possible?

I am creating a web service in .NET to expose some already created .NET
programs to other groups. One group is writing the client in PERL, and thus
wishes the wsdl schema to not be sequenced. (PERL hashes do not retain order
information) First, the w3 specs don't mention the sequence in any detail -
its just there in the examples, which makes me wonder if removing the
sequence tag is even supportable. Second, I can find nothing in the .NET
documentatio n that suggests how I would remove the sequence information, and
nothing in DefaultWsdlHelp Generator.aspx that even mentions sequence.

I suppose I could try generating the .asmx?WSDL, manually removing the
sequence tags, then having people point to it, but I am not sure that would
work.

Anyone have any ideas?

[kevin]

"Marvin Smit" wrote:

Hi,

Can i rephrase this question and post if back to you?

"Can you guys change the XSD spec so I can write a webservice which is
used by a perl implementation, which uses hashes and therefore cannot
maintain a sequence?"

The "sequence" is a composer. One of three possible;
- sequence
- choice
- all

It makes no sense removing the composer. If you do, the only thing
that might happen is that 'a default' is used. Which again would be
one of the three mentioned above.

My advise would be;

Get the "Perl" implementation to adhere to standards, not the other
way around.

Hope this helps,

Marvin Smit.
On Tue, 13 Sep 2005 06:56:03 -0700, "kevin"
<ke***@discussi ons.microsoft.c om> wrote:

Is that even possible?

I am creating a web service in .NET to expose some already created .NET
programs to other groups. One group is writing the client in PERL, and thus
wishes the wsdl schema to not be sequenced. (PERL hashes do not retain order
information) First, the w3 specs don't mention the sequence in any detail -
its just there in the examples, which makes me wonder if removing the
sequence tag is even supportable. Second, I can find nothing in the .NET
documentatio n that suggests how I would remove the sequence information, and
nothing in DefaultWsdlHelp Generator.aspx that even mentions sequence.

I suppose I could try generating the .asmx?WSDL, manually removing the
sequence tags, then having people point to it, but I am not sure that would
work.

Anyone have any ideas?

Marvin

I am going to assume that my last line is the problem here. I suppose that
last line could be read as asking for a way to remove the entire tag and not
just change the sequence information. The problem is that the .NET API for
creating web services does not seem to allow me to change that information
from the default of "sequence" to "all".

Having said that, the implementation on the PERL side does adhere to the
service standard. Hashes are just data constructs -- the output can be
massaged however we see fit. Since it’s a hash, however, it doesn't retain
information about order or structure and thus allowing the web service to use
the "all" option would make the PERL implementation faster and cleaner.

If the .NET API doesn't provide for a means of changing the value of the
sequence tag, then I would have to say that it’s the .NET implementation with
the problem adhering to standards. I doubt that, though -- I am sure there
is a way to do this, I just haven't found it.

[EJSawyer]

I don't know if it'll help you, but I ran into a similar issue with
generating XML (non web-services) from a C++ client, using the MSXML
components. The schema we had to adhere to demanded proper sequence, but
without hard-coding cardinality information ("b" follows "a", "d1" must come
before "d2.2", etc), it was extremely difficult to keep everything in
sequence.

What I wound up doing was to assign each element an ordinal attribute. As
the element was inserted into the document, the code would walk the tree and
ensure that proper sequence was maintained.

This produced proper sequence, but caused a side effect: the ordinal
attributes were rejected on the receiving end because they weren't in the
schema. The solution was to build all the XML, then feed it through an XSL
transform that stripped out the cardinality data. It was easy, clean, and
fast.

Whether this can be done from your perl client, I don't know, but it's worth
a try.

Erik J Sawyer
Appro Systems

"kevin" wrote:

"Marvin Smit" wrote:

Hi,

Can i rephrase this question and post if back to you?

"Can you guys change the XSD spec so I can write a webservice which is
used by a perl implementation, which uses hashes and therefore cannot
maintain a sequence?"

The "sequence" is a composer. One of three possible;
- sequence
- choice
- all

It makes no sense removing the composer. If you do, the only thing
that might happen is that 'a default' is used. Which again would be
one of the three mentioned above.

My advise would be;

Get the "Perl" implementation to adhere to standards, not the other
way around.

Hope this helps,

Marvin Smit.
On Tue, 13 Sep 2005 06:56:03 -0700, "kevin"
<ke***@discussi ons.microsoft.c om> wrote:

Is that even possible?

I am creating a web service in .NET to expose some already created .NET
programs to other groups. One group is writing the client in PERL, and thus
wishes the wsdl schema to not be sequenced. (PERL hashes do not retain order
information) First, the w3 specs don't mention the sequence in any detail -
its just there in the examples, which makes me wonder if removing the
sequence tag is even supportable. Second, I can find nothing in the .NET
documentatio n that suggests how I would remove the sequence information, and
nothing in DefaultWsdlHelp Generator.aspx that even mentions sequence.

I suppose I could try generating the .asmx?WSDL, manually removing the
sequence tags, then having people point to it, but I am not sure that would
work.

Anyone have any ideas?

Marvin

I am going to assume that my last line is the problem here. I suppose that
last line could be read as asking for a way to remove the entire tag and not
just change the sequence information. The problem is that the .NET API for
creating web services does not seem to allow me to change that information
from the default of "sequence" to "all".

Having said that, the implementation on the PERL side does adhere to the
service standard. Hashes are just data constructs -- the output can be
massaged however we see fit. Since it’s a hash, however, it doesn't retain
information about order or structure and thus allowing the web service to use
the "all" option would make the PERL implementation faster and cleaner.

If the .NET API doesn't provide for a means of changing the value of the
sequence tag, then I would have to say that it’s the .NET implementation with
the problem adhering to standards. I doubt that, though -- I am sure there
is a way to do this, I just haven't found it.