Is it possible to remove the 'soap12' namespace from the WSDL for basicHttpBinding endpoints (i.e soap 1.1 clients)?

Question

Hello,
We want to import the WSDL from a running WCF service endpoint (which is using basic HTTP binding) in order to implement the same web service interface in a Lotus Notes application. Unfortunately the proxy generator for Lotus Notes doesn't like the particular dialect of WSDL that our WCF service is exposing, in particular it throws a wobbly when it sees
xmlns:soap12=http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap12/.
Even though soap1.2 isn't being used, the basic http binding is leaving this reference in the wsdl and Lotus Notes seems to think this is a SOAP 1.2 WSDL file even though I know it's a SOAP 1.1 compatible file.
In order to get around this I'm using disco.exe to pull the wsdl files down locally, manually edit the files to remove this unused name space and then edit all the schema import locations to convert lines such as http://localhost:7780/MEX?xsd=xsd0 to lines such as file://\wsdl\MEX.xsd etc...
Is there a simple setting somewhere that will remove that 'soap12' fragment from the wsdl? It's a bit of a pain because we are in a development phase and so the WSDL isn't completely stable at the moment and is changing frequently which requires this manual editing stage.
Thanks
Paul.

Answer 1

The following method works correctly for me:
public class Soap11WsdlExporter : WsdlExporter
    public override MetadataSet GetGeneratedMetadata()
        var metadataSet = base.GetGeneratedMetadata();
        foreach (var metadataSection in metadataSet.MetadataSections)
            var description = metadataSection.Metadata as System.Web.Services.Description.ServiceDescription;
            if (description != null)
                var namespaces = description.Namespaces.ToArray();
                var newNamespaces = new XmlSerializerNamespaces();
                foreach (var ns in namespaces)
                    if (ns.Name.ToLower() != "soap12")
                        newNamespaces.Add(ns.Name, ns.Namespace);
                description.Namespaces = newNamespaces;
        return metadataSet;
public class MyServiceHostFactory : ServiceHostFactory
    protected override ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses)
        ServiceHost serviceHost = new ServiceHost(serviceType, baseAddresses);
        var useSoap11 = true;
        //We only removing SOAP12 namespace only if all the bindings use SOAP11.
        foreach(var endPoint in serviceHost.Description.Endpoints)
            useSoap11 &= endPoint.Binding.MessageVersion.Envelope == EnvelopeVersion.Soap11;
        if (useSoap11)
            var behavior = serviceHost.Description.Behaviors.Find<ServiceMetadataBehavior>();
            if (behavior != null)
                behavior.MetadataExporter = new Soap11WsdlExporter();
        return serviceHost;
Hope this helps
Another Paradigm Shift
http://shevaspace.blogspot.com