2008-01-25
Flex’ Soap Nillable
In a current project we are working heavily with SOAP (Axis) Backed Services. The big issue is the null type. Say you have an operation that expects 2 parameters. Second one can be null. Now in SDK 2.0.1 the null parameter is serialized to no xml and simply left away. This worked for us because the axis server was set to nillable=false. A problem came up when I switched to another SDK (FLEX 2.0.1 Hotfix 3) , that came along with a fresh Flex Builder 3 Alpha installation. Although this SDK was named similair to the Hotfix 3 (that you can download manually) this version obviously is different because it got most probably updated from the daily builds. So this new Hotfix 3 wrapped a nillable object around the NULL object which caused an exception on the server because of nillable disabled.
What totaly confused us is that both Hotfix 3 versions still have the same name but definitely differ - and it really took us minutes to figure out what was actually going on. So now I switched to SDK Flex 3 Beta 3 which converted null to an empty xml param but not wrapping with the nillable.
Well, I hope I got that right and did not mix things here! Please enlighten me!
In short: Latest SDKs handle SOAP null different - It seems to me that the Flex development team is working on that.
