Possible to consume badly formed Fault Messages?

Question

I've a WCF client communicating with an unknown server implementation which I have no control over. This client works fine it just doesn't like, what appears to be, incorrectly formed SOAP Fault messages. The messages I receive look like:

<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">   
    <soap:Header>...</soap:Header>  
    <soap:Body>  
        <soap:Fault>  
            <soap:faultcode>soap:Client</soap:faultcode>  
            <soap:faultstring>...</soap:faultstring>  
            <soap:detail>...</soap:detail>  
        </soap:Fault>  
    </soap:Body>  
</soap:Envelope>  

I believe according to the soap schema the child elements shouldn't be qualified and ned to look like:

<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">   
    <soap:Header>...</soap:Header>  
    <soap:Body>  
        <soap:Fault>  
            <faultcode>soap:Client</faultcode>  
            <faultstring>...</faultstring>  
            <detail>...</detail>  
        </soap:Fault>  
    </soap:Body> 
</soap:Envelope>

Is there something that I can configure or override so that I can consume messages which arrive in the latter format so that I can consume the fault messages instead of xml exceptions?

Answer 1

I'm cannot recall how I found stumbled across Message Inspectors, but that it how I solved my problem.

This and this article provided the base for creating the inspector, and what follows is the meat of the inspector:

public void AfterReceiveReply(ref Message reply, object correlationState)
{
    if (!reply.IsFault)
        return;

    var document = new XmlDocument();

    document.Load(reply.GetReaderAtBodyContents());

    var navigator = document.CreateNavigator();
    var manager = new XmlNamespaceManager(navigator.NameTable);

    manager.AddNamespace("soap", "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/");

    var it = navigator.Select("//soap:Fault", manager);

    if (it.MoveNext() && it.Current.HasChildren && it.Current.MoveToChild(XPathNodeType.Element))
    {
        do
        {
            var c = it.Current;

            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(c.Prefix))
                continue;

            c.ReplaceSelf("<" + c.LocalName + ">" + c.InnerXml + "</" + c.LocalName + ">");

            /// we may want to record the detail included inside the detail element, 
            /// it is not reported in the FaultException that is raised.

        } while (it.Current.MoveToNext());
    }

    var reader = XmlDictionaryReader.CreateDictionaryReader(new XmlNodeReader(document));

    reader.MoveToStartElement();

    var fixedReply = Message.CreateMessage(reply.Version, null, reader);

    fixedReply.Headers.CopyHeadersFrom(reply.Headers);
    fixedReply.Properties.CopyProperties(reply.Properties);

    reply = fixedReply;
}