It happened that I had to call a webservice implemented in PHP from a .NET client via a standard SOAP interface, however it turned out again that Simple Object Access Protocol is not so simple in the real world.
The client received a 400 Bad Request response status from the server which itself, without any more details, didn’t help much to find the real problem. The Apache webserver log contained an Invalid URI in request entry, but that didn’t bring me closer to the solution either.
As many times before, Fiddler helped. Diving into the HTTP traffic I noticed that the request contained an Expect: 100-continue header which was not handled by the webserver. This is a very interesting header, which allows the client to ask the server to evaluate the request headers before the client submits the request body (see RFC 2616 Section 8.2.3 for more details). In short this single header can drastically change the classic request-response sequence to something like this:
Client –> Server:
POST example.com HTTP/1.1 request headers Expect: 100-Continue
Server –> Client:
HTTP/1.1 100 Continue response headers
Client –> Server:
request body
Server –> Client:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK response headers response body
The .NET client always sends this header to minimize the network traffic, but it seems that not all servers tolerate it. You can use the Expect100Continue property of the ServicePointManager class to override this behavior:
ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false;
You may even have better performance this way, because the HttpWebRequest class by default waits 350 msec for the Continue response.
I learned it. I share it. 