OpenSAML user discussion

[Brent Putman <>]

 wrote:
> this creates tags that appear as soap11:Envelope and soap11:Body.  This is 
> expected - however our customers are expecting to see SOAP-ENV:Envelope and 
> SOAP-ENV:Body tags (I'm not sure it should matter if the namespace is the 
> same - but I do not know how they are parsing what I am sending them).

No, it shouldn't matter, the prefixes are arbitrary, and if they can
only process the XML if it has certain namespace prefixes, then whatever
they are doing or using is pretty broken. 


One can also observe (with some amusement?) that some code generation
tools for SOAP toolkits (e.g. Apache Axis2), generate completely
arbitrary namespace prefixes like "ns1", "ns2", etc - apparently the
exactly opposite mindset of this customer's tool. 

So one really can't make any assumptions on the XML receiving/processing
side about particular namespace prefixes being used.


>  Can anyone shed some light on the best way to create the SOAP-ENV:Envelope 
> and SOAP-ENV:Body tags ?? Is there a way using the Opensaml API's, or would 
> I need to use something else ?? 

No, OpenSAML doesn't really provide a way to change this.  However, you
could use another SOAP toolkit, like Axis2, to generate the SOAP XML. 
I'm not sure that they provide a way to set the namespace prefixes that
are used either, however, for the same reasons that we don't.

Note also that OpenSAML doesn't yet have a SOAP client component
(hopefully in the next minor release), so assuming you actually want to
send the AttributeQuery somewhere over the SAML SOAP binding, you would
need something there too, and something like Axis2 is a good candidate,
so maybe kill 2 birds with 1 stone. See their basic "raw" client that
just takes OMElements as input/output. Or you can roll your own client,
since the SAML SOAP binding is not very complicated.