SOAP adapter and WS with rpc/encoded

Question

Hi All,
Does anyone know if and how the SAP XI 3.0 SOAP Adapter supports WebServices which expects XML messages in rpc/encoded.
Cheers,
FRank

Answer 1

Hi Frank,
I have the same issue and I got a reply from OSS:
  This problem is caused by the diversification of the WSDL binding
styles.
  A Web service is described by a WSDL document. A WSDL binding
describes how the service is bound to a messaging protocol, particularly
the SOAP messaging protocol. A WSDL SOAP binding can be either an RPC
style binding or a document style binding. A SOAP binding can also have
an encoded use or a literal use. This gives us four style/use models:
- RPC/encoded
- RPC/literal
- document/encoded(It will probably disappear from future versions of
WSDL.)
- document/literal
  RPC styled web services have serious interoperability problems. This
is the reason that the rpc style is not in the basic profile
specification of the web interoperability and also it has been
deprecated in the current soap specification. For these reason, the
integration directory does not currently support the RPC style! I would
suggest you to use other document style web service provider if possible
. It's the best way to solve this problem. But if you persist in using
this RPC web service provider, we still have a workaround solution:
you need to convert your RPC wsdl to a document styled wsdl and import
it to  the directory and if necessary, you need to add some mapping to
solve some RPC interoperability problems.
  In your case,
1. The WSDL file you used is RPC style.
2. The XI SOAP adapter doesn't support the RPC style. It only sends the
document/literal SOAP message which can't be understand by your web
service provider.
  One of the significant differences between the SOAP message of RPC
style and that of the document style: the operation name is contained in
the RPC style SOAP message but not in the document's.
  However, you can't solve this problem by simply specify a method
name. What you should do is convert your RPC wsdl to a document styled
wsdl. RPC turns out to be a subset of document/literal. This
means for any given RPC WSDL, you can create a completely
equivalent document/literal WSDL that would describe the same wire
messages. Here are the steps for doing this (mostly schema element
declarations).
Solution:
For each RPC operation:
1. For each part in the input and output messages of that operation,
declare a type with the contents described in step 2.
2. Declare an element with the name of the part, the type referenced by
type=". The element form must be unqualified.
3. Declare a global element with the operation name and the namespace
from soap:body/@namespace in the binding. Make the type of this element
the one defined in step 1 for the input message.
4. Declare a global element with the operation name and the word
Response appended to it and the namespace from soap:body/@namespace in
the binding. Make the type of this element the one defined in step 1 for
the output message.
5. Change the input message to contain one part and reference the
element you declared in step 3.
6. Change the output message to contain one part and reference the
element you declared in step 4.
7. Change the style to document in the binding.
  After that, import the new WSDL file to the integration directory. You
will find the "method name" appears in the document style SOAP message.
But actually it's the name of the input element which is the same as
the name of the operation. It's just a little trick.
Cheers Stefan