SOAP input/output messages missing Header element

[mmakaay]

When generating SOAP messages from a WSDL, the Envelope for input and output defines only a Body and no Header.

Envelope specification: https://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508/#_Toc478383494

A SOAP message is an XML document that consists of a mandatory SOAP envelope, an optional SOAP header, and a mandatory SOAP body.

A generated SOAP message now looks like:

@dataclass
class SomeOperationInput:
    class Meta:
        name = "Envelope"
        namespace = "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"

    body: Optional["SomeOperationInput.Body"] = field(
        default=None,
        metadata={
            "name": "Body",
            "type": "Element",
        },
    )

    @dataclass
    class Body:
    -----8<-------

The Header element is missing here.

As a result, I am unable to parse incoming SOAP requests that I send from SOAP UI. The parser complains about the now unexpected Header element.

xsdata.exceptions.ParserError: Unknown property {http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/}Envelope:{http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/}Header

with the request message structure looking like:

<soapenv:Envelope
      xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" 
      xmlns:v20="http://www.reggefiber.nl/schemas/odfaccess/order/client/v20140102" 
      xmlns:v201="http://www.exmaple.com/soap">
   <soapenv:Header/>
   <soapenv:Body>
      <v20:MyRequest>
         <!-- -----8<----- -->
      </v20:MyRequest>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

Work-around

I currently work around this issue, by removing the Header from the request body, before passing it on to the xsdata parser. I use the following code for this:

from lxml import etree

def strip_header_from_envelope(request_xml: bytes) -> bytes:
    tree = etree.fromstring(request_xml)
    headers = tree.xpath(
        "/soapenv:Envelope/soapenv:Header",
        namespaces={"soapenv": "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"}
    )
    if headers:
        envelope = headers[0].getparent()
        envelope.remove(headers[0])
    request_xml_without_header = etree.tostring(tree, encoding="utf-8")
    return request_xml_without_header

This is not super efficient, since the XML gets deserialzed and serialzed to handle the removal of the Header from the request XML data.

[tefra]

You can disable failures on unknown properties @mmakaay

https://xsdata.readthedocs.io/en/latest/data_binding/basics/#fail_on_unknown_properties

Shouldn't the wsdl include information about the header then, I am not sure what we should generate there...

[mmakaay]

An optional empty Header would do I think, since that is what SOAP UI seems to find valid.

For my use case, I am fine with disabling failures here.
Thanks for the hint, and feel free to close this issue.