What does "No Native to Message converter set" mean? - delphi

I need to talk to some web service and thus I imported the WSDL. I now try to call it but it reports this exception: No Native to Message converter setVery, very irritating, especially since I have no permission to post code snippets from this service here. Still, have to try... Does anyone have some suggestions about how to fix this error?
The error is generated in rio.pas in the function TRIO.Generic. This line:
if not Assigned(FConverter) then
raise Exception.Create(SNoMessageConverter);
For unknown reasons, FConverter is set to nil, thus the exception is generated. This happens even before the request is sent. Nothing is sent to the service, since Delphi crashes even before it can call the service.
WSDL Import options, checked options:
One Outparam is Return
Unwind literal params
Generate destructors
Warning comments
Map string to widestring
Generate verbose information about types and interfaces
Ignore porttypes with HTTP bindings
Do not emit unused types
Validate enumeration types
Import fault types
Import header types
Process included and imported schemas
Generate class aliases as class types
Process nillable and optional elements
Actually, My system is new, Delphi was installed about 3 days ago and importing this WSDL was the first thing I did, basically using these default settings.

Use SoapUI consume the WSDL and make a mock service. Point your app at your SoapUI mockservice, and you can capture your outbound requests. Now you can turn around and submit those requests to the service and see the response. That should give you an idea of where the message is coming from. i.e. is it coming from Delphi's SOAP library as a result of something that it doesn't understand, or is it coming from the web service itself, as a result of something that IT didn't understand in your request?
Alternately, you can do this in Delphi: Intercept the inbound/outbound XML by leveraging the RIO_BeforeExecute/RIO_AfterExecute events of your HttpRIO object.
If your traffic is http (harder with SSL but possible) you can also intercept with Fiddler2.
Once you have the raw XML, submit requests with SoapUI, and see what you get. You may find that your requests need "tweaking", or if everything looks fine in SoapUI, you may need to tweak the responses before de-serialization.

Related

Sending Signed XML to secure WebService returns BadSignature

I am using Delphi 7's HTTPReqResp component to send a digitally signed SOAP XML Document to a HTTPS web service. I use Eldos XML BlackBox and have set all the transformAlgorithms, CanonicalizationMethod, signaturemethod, etc. to the ones the web service requires and have confirmed this with a tech support officer.
I have validated the signature using XML BlackBox and also this XML Verifier website.
Both ways confirm the signature is correct. However, when I send the XML document via HTTPReqResp.execute, the response I get back is BadSignature (The signature value is invalid).
Originally, I received back a different error messages due to XML errors (malformed, etc.). It appears that the service will do all the standard formatting checks first, then it will attempt to validate the signature. Since I get back the BadSignature response, the rest of the XML must be correct.
I suppose I have 2 questions here.
Does the HTTPReqResp component alter the XML.
Is it likely the webservice alters the XML.
The site is using Access Manager WebSEAL.
It's very likely that the receiving partner is getting a modified document somehow. Some minor modifications shouldn't affect the signature (that's the idea, at least) so you may want to check the following:
"Recommended" encoding used by the receiving partner. A very annoying practice by some receiving partners is to favor one form of encoding and completely ignore others. XML signatures should use utf-8 but I've seen servers that only accept iso-8859-1
Make sure you don't accidentally change encoding after signing.
Verify that the receiving partner is using a sane canonicalization method.
Verify with your receiving partner that no extraneous elements are being added to your document.
Also, have you tried to post this using the SecureBlackBox components? They also have an HTTP client that can do SSL, and that can be used to also verify the bytes being sent through the wire.

Is there a way to browse WSDL endpoints using a browser?

I want to test the results from a WSDL service in a browser like IE9 or FireFox. I know that I can view the WSDL XML, but I want to test the return results of an endpoint called GetEmployeeById that accepts a parameter called Id and returns a class. I am assuming this is all serialized to XML, so a browser would be a good fit for testing this. Is this possible?
In case you are using Visual Studio for .net development, I think something much better than a browser probably would to use:
wcftestclient <url>
which can be called from the command prompt and is part of the tools from visual studio.
The tool will help you to build and receive complex objects and see the results already serialized.
internet explorer let's you make a request with simple string parameters if the WSDL provides enough information.
If you haven't seen it, then probably the WSDL is only for discoverability reasons, probably just points to another service in a different transport protocol, not port 80, if the service is not on port 80 you won't be able to use your browser.
You have another more complex tool called FIDDLER that you can format any kind of http request, as well as receiving any kind of requests, like json for example.
You can use this URL to test WSDL endpoints, send request and see response.

What is the "Best Practice" for SOAP servers to implement error notification?

I am developing some SOAP web services using Ruby on Rails and considering how to handle generic failures. These generic errors are applicable to all the methods within the service and include the following :-
Missing Request element
Missing Authentication element (Custom)
Invalid Authentication details
I can intercept these errors within my controller before calling the relevant method and respond appropriately. My question is which implementation is easiest to manage from a Client perspective. My options for handling these errors seem to be as follows.
Raise an exception and let the SOAP service generate a SoapFault. This would be fine except I have little (no) control over the structure of the message contained within the SOAP fault.
Return an Http 400 response with an agreed data structure to indicate the error message. This structure would not be defined within the WSDL though.
Include a Status element in all responses, whether successful or not and have that status element include a code and an array of error data (Including error messages).
Option three seems like the best solution but is also the most error prone to implement as the implementation of web services in ROR precludes me from implementing this in a generic way and each method becomes responsible for checking the result of the checks and rendering an appropriate response. Admittedly this would be a single function call and return on failure but it is relying on the developer to remember to do this as we add more options.
I appreciate that most ROR developers will say that this should be implemented as a REST service and I agree, in fact we already have REST services to do this but the spread of SOAP in the corporate world, and its impressive tooling support means that we have to provide SOAP services to remain competitive.
In your experience what would be the easiest implementation for clients to handle and does this differ dependant upon the libraries/language of the client process.
A SoapFault would be the preferred way to signify errors. SoapFaults can contain additional information in their <detail> element.
The advantage of a SoapFault over some status element is that the caller can use standard exception handling, instead of checking for some status field.

Sending custom HTTP error information to Flash, JavaScript, etc

I'm developing a REST API at the moment, and one of the core features of this is that is uses a variety of HTTP status codes to return status/error information, some of which may be extended information (e.g. if an item is not found, some other similar items) which will be in the response body.
This is fine until you get to 'crippled' clients like Flash and JavaScript which can't access the response body or headers unless the HTTP status code is 200 OK (even a 201 Created success code can cause Flash to fail thinking it's an error).
So my question is, is there a standard way for allowing this type of client to request that all status codes are HTTP 200, and to indicate the real status code in another way?
One solution I was thinking of is, in the pattern of the HTTP Accept-* family of headers, using an X-Accept-Status extension header to specify which status codes can be handled, e.g. Flash would send...
X-Accept-Status: 200
...and then any status code not in this list would be mapped to one that is, and the error returned in the response body, possibly with another extension header indicating the real status code, e.g.
X-HTTP-Status-Code: 404 Not Found
This all seems a bit horrible, and working against the protocol, but if you have clients that cannot use the protocol property then that's unavoidable. I'm just looking for something a bit like X-HTTP-Method-Override (which is a 'standard' way of working around the protocol for clients that cannot send PUT/DELETE requests) but for clients that cannot understand status codes.
well, actually the problem with HTTP and REST is, that REST is a really good idea, and HTTP describes a really good implementation of it ... but really, many clients and servers only implement part of HTTP ...
i don't think HTTP is a must ... still, REST is a good idea and RESTfulness of a system is a powerful property ... so why not use HTTP as a stupid transport layer for a RESTful system?
this is what you are doing, although in my opinion, you are holding on a bit too much to HTTP and all it's theoretically built-in features ... do you really need to transport the information in a status code?
don't depend so much on your transport protocol/layer ... have a clear idea in mind, how your service should work ... seperate the protocol semantics from its implementation ... on both client and server ... abstract your RESTfulness and status codes too (make them more then just integers ... make it enums, or objects ... exceptions, why not?)...
and then plug-in protocols/transport layers at will ...
make a standard HTTP implementation
make a hacky one, using the solution you described (which to me seems perfectly valid ... if people are using technologies unable to use the standards, why should you bother too much finding the most standard-conform solution)
make whatever you have the time to do, and your server is able to do, binary, JSON, XML ... whatever seems adequate ...
two technical notes, though:
flash player does it's HTTP traffic over the browser ... and it simply does not get the status codes from the browser ... well it depends on the browser in fact ... the specs say, it does not work for: "Netscape, Mozilla, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer for the Macintosh." ... so IE for windows should be working? Chrome? I don't know ... but i think, it doesn't matter, since obviously, you cannot rely on it ... oh, and to state the most obvious: JavaScript also does its HTTP over the browser, of course ... so same problem here ...
for both this implies, that if you would succeed in finding something like X-HTTP-Method-Override for response, that is built in the protocol, a good browser would understand that, and would remap things accordingly, before deciding which information to give to JavaScript or 3rd-party plugins ... so you'd end up with nothing again ... i guess ...
you should simply choose your response method based on the client ... and maybe the client should send some extra info, if it is unable to use the HTTP standard ... otherwise throw at it, what follows the standard ... i'd first make an implementation using standard HTTP, yet hiding the HTTP itself away, and once everything works, write one using
greetz
back2dos
Am I wrong for thinking that one shouldn't let a crippled out-of-the-box potential client to the API dictate the features of the API implementation? I guess practical considerations win the day, but in general I guess my vote is in favor of building API implementations "properly" and requiring custom client-side programming as needed.
Bit late for that response, but...
When I implemented a flash client API with an early version of OpenRasta, I had X-ResponseLine that contained the response code and text, on each outgoing request.
As headers are by default only generic headers, they have no involvement in caching, so no reason to have an Accept / Vary on this.

How to access AS3 URLLoader return data on IOErrorEvent

I'm writing an actionscript library for an api. I use a URLLoader object to load data from the api. The problem I'm having is that whenever the api returns an http status in the 400s, actionscript treats this as an io error. This is all find and good, however, it seems like there is no way to access any data that was returned if this is the case. Consequently, any helpful xml about the cause of the error that gets returned is lost. Is there any way around this? It makes the library kind of a pain, if there can't be any useful information for developers when the api returns an error. Thanks for any help!
You can't get access to the data in an event of a 400. You can get the status code, however, by adding a listener for the HTTP status event.
If you control the back-end code, there are a couple of workarounds:
One option is to have the backend respond with 200s even in error cases when talking to a flash client, but with a special error code so the client knows that the 200 response is actually an error.
Another option is to set a cookie on the client containing the error message. Flash can't natively access cookies, but you can call out to javascript using ExternalInterface to read the cookie, or optionally the client can do another hit to a special back-end controller that reads the cookie and responds with an error message.

Resources