I am using ruby to send a SOAP request to a very enterprisey bla bla service, so unfortunately I can not attach any samples, there's nobody to send any server-side logs, nobody knows whats wrong on the provider side or how the actual HTTP requests need to look like (except a single XML example I got, but no HTTP headers), the docs are very Microsoft-centric with C# examples and whatnot ("instantiate AbstractFactoryFactory..." and whatnot), long live enterprise software.
But the bottom line is, eventually I took one of their own XMLs from their logs and sent it via HTTP to the endpoint from the WSDL and sent it to their host using the Savon gem raw XML option and got a HTTP 500 error from their host and a bunch of non-ascii binary data inside - literally, no ASCII characters are in the body.
I guessed that maybe Savon does some bad magic or that the XML option is not working as expected and I tried sending the same request via Faraday, but got the same thing,
the HTTP response headers says it's a HTTP response, XML encoded, from an ASP.NET host:
"content-type"=>"text/xml; charset=utf-8",
"server"=>"Microsoft-IIS/7.5",
"x-aspnet-version"=>"2.0.50727",
"x-powered-by"=>"ASP.NET",
but again, a 440 bytes worth of binaries in the response:
method=:post,
body=
"\x1F\x8B\b\x00\x00...
etc.
Am I missing some weird aspect of the SOAP specification and I need to do something to decode this data or has their server gone bonkers from my XML, HTTP headers or something else and I need to ping the provider?
Update 1
I noticed that their original XML had UTF-16 encoding set, so I tried encoding the raw string to UTF-16, then had Savon spew errors at me about bad data, then I updated encoding in the Savon client config. But I still get HTTP 500 error and binaries as response and if I try to log anything Savon reports a bug:
Encoding::CompatibilityError: incompatible encoding regexp match (US-ASCII regexp with UTF-16 string)
from /home/bbozo/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.4/gems/savon-2.11.1/lib/savon/log_message.rb:13:in `to_s'
Faraday basically reported the same behavior, an binary blob.
Update 2
I tried piping the encoding to every known encoding, and got nothing, even though the HTTP headers imply the encoding is UTF-8, it obviously isn't
Encoding.name_list.map{ |e_in| [ e_in, ( response.body.dup.force_encoding(e_in).encode('utf-8') rescue 'incompatible' ) ] }
There is nothing that would indicate the encoding in the WSDL files, the API spec doesn't even mention encoding except that the request XMLs need to be UTF-8 encoding, I tried encoding the body, changing the XML encoding definition, HTTP headers, but still I get the same binary blob, with the same heading (\x1F\x8B\b\x00\x00) - so it's not some weird encryption either.
Compression maybe?
I tried with https for good measure and nothing.
Question
Am I missing some weird aspect of the SOAP specification and I need to do something to decode this data or has their server gone bonkers from my XML, HTTP headers or something else and I need to ping the provider?
