Ensure that they convey sufficient information. Abritrary categorisation is something that is unncessary when you've got sufficient information because the Fault will allow itself to be indentified.

When Exceptions Are the Rule : Achieving reliable and traceable service-oriented architectures. Use SOAP Faults to deliver the appropriate level of detail to the developer at development time, and to the customer while the Web service is in production.

Web services use SOAP faults to report fault cases back to clients. The faults can be generated from the SOAP framework in a case of invalid SOAP messages, invalid security tokens or they can be generated from the service business logic itself. If you send a message that was not successful for some reason, you may get back a response containing a SOAP fault element, which gives you status information, error information, or both.

It's the mission of this section to provide a full and detailed explanation of SOAP faults so that you can handle them appropriately in your own Web services.

I think the short answer is use a soap fault, unless you know the client will be equipped to handle an error returned as the result. I was also thinking the analogy between exceptions and error results, as mentioned in the other answers. There are grey areas that could both be reasonably treated as exceptions and as result errors depending upon the needs of the client. You might then provide a parameter to the service that alters how these types of error is returned.

The default is to use a SOAP fault, but if the client sets the parameter to get error results, then it is indicating that it is willing to handle this as part of the result. For me, validation errors are in this grey area. For most clients they should be considered faults, but if the client wants to use the data to markup the UI with validation errors, then returning the validation errors as part of the result may be more useful.

The service consumer can rely that all kind of business response comes in response objects and presents it to service business users. The Soap Faults are used only when business response cannot be delivered.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. SOAP faults or results object? Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 6 months ago. Active 4 years, 9 months ago. Viewed 54k times. Some points to consider: Is a data validation error a fault?

This chapter describes how to handle faults within a web service and within a web client. How to create fault objects manually. How to add WS-Addressing header elements when faults occur. How to add custom header elements when faults occur. How to handle errors and SOAP faults in a web client.

The following shows an example for SOAP 1. The SOAP envelope is omitted in this example:. To create and return a custom SOAP fault, do the following within the appropriate area of your code that traps errors:. Create a fault object that contains the appropriate information.

These are discussed in the following subsection. Or create a fault object manually, as described in later in this chapter. Call the ReturnFault method of the web service, passing the fault object as an argument. Note that ReturnFault does not return to its caller; it just sends the fault and terminates processing of the web method.

Set this property equal to one of the SOAP 1. Specify a string that indicates the reason for the fault, as intended for users to see.

Use this to specify information about the cause of the fault. It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss this advanced topic. Returns a fault object suitable for SOAP 1. Use this method only the SoapVersion property of the web service is "1.

For details on the arguments, see MakeFault. Returns a fault object appropriate for a security failure. In addition, the detail element itself may contain any number of qualified attributes, as long as they do not belong to the SOAP 1. It's perfectly legal to use an empty detail element, but you must not omit the detail element entirely if the fault resulted while processing the contents of the original message's Body element.

SOAP provides little guidance on how details about header faults should be provided. It says only that detailed information must be included in the Header element. As a developer, it's your responsibility to be aware of the various circumstances under which faults must be generated, and to ensure that your code properly implements the processing of those faults. The incoming message is properly structured, but it uses elements and namespaces in the Body element that the receiver doesn't recognize.

The first two conditions generate what are considered Client faults, faults that relate to the contents of the message: The client has sent an invalid or unfamiliar SOAP message to the receiver. The third condition results in a MustUnderstand fault, and the fourth results in a VersionMismatch fault.

The fifth condition is considered a Server fault, which means the error was unrelated to the contents of the SOAP message. A server fault is generated when the receiver cannot process a SOAP message because of an abnormal condition.

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Therefore, we must generate a fault when it sees the message header tag combined with the mustUnderstand attribute. Next, we create a Response object and supply it with the Fault object that we created:. Note that in the SOAP 1. SOAP 1. The general idea is that the body of a Fault message should contain only the errors that resulted from processing the body of the message that caused the Fault. Likewise, detailed information about any errors that occur as the result of processing a header block should be placed in the header block of the resulting Fault message.

The SOAP 1. The new codes are listed in Table The encodingStyle attribute contained in either the header or body is not supported. Skip to main content.