Get actual SOAP message (XML) before it's send by the Client application

Question

I want to get the actual content of the XML SOAP message, which will be send to the server using a SOAP webservcie reference in a .NET Client application.

Answer 1

I've been searching my head of on how to get the actual content of a SOAP message, which is send to the server.

Finally I found the answer, which I would like to share here with very simple code - based on https://wcfpro.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/iclientmessageinspector/

First create an Windows Forms application and add a reference to a SOAP webservice.

Then create the classes as specified in https://wcfpro.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/iclientmessageinspector/

See below a copy out of that post

public class MyBehavior : IEndpointBehavior
{

    public void AddBindingParameters(
        ServiceEndpoint endpoint,
        BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters)
    {
    }

    public void ApplyClientBehavior(
        ServiceEndpoint endpoint, 
        ClientRuntime clientRuntime)
    {
        clientRuntime.MessageInspectors.Add(new MyMessageInspector());
    }

    public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(
        ServiceEndpoint endpoint, 
        EndpointDispatcher endpointDispatcher)
    {
    }

    public void Validate(
        ServiceEndpoint endpoint)
    {
    }
}

public class MyMessageInspector : IClientMessageInspector
{
    public void AfterReceiveReply(ref Message reply, object correlationState)
    {
        // use 'reply.ToString()' te get content and do something with is
    }

    public object BeforeSendRequest(ref Message request, IClientChannel channel)
    {
        // use 'request.ToString()' te get content and do something with is
        return null;
    }
}

And now comes the most important part, which took me a while to figure out. When you create instance of the webservice:

MyServiceClient svc = new MyServiceClient();

Then add the behavior to the service using this code:

svc.ChannelFactory.Endpoint.Behaviors.Add(new MyBehavior());

And now you have something you can start to work with!