Tracking it down

At first I thought this was a coercion bug where null was getting coerced to "null" and a test of "null" == null was passing. It's not. I was close, but so very, very wrong. Sorry about that!

I've since done lots of fiddling on wonderfl.net and tracing through the code in mx.rpc.xml.*. At line 1795 of XMLEncoder (in the 3.5 source), in setValue, all of the XMLEncoding boils down to

currentChild.appendChild(xmlSpecialCharsFilter(Object(value)));

which is essentially the same as:

currentChild.appendChild("null");

This code, according to my original fiddle, returns an empty XML element. But why?

Cause

According to commenter Justin Mclean on bug report FLEX-33664, the following is the culprit (see last two tests in my fiddle which verify this):

var thisIsNotNull:XML = <root>null</root>;
if(thisIsNotNull == null){
    // always branches here, as (thisIsNotNull == null) strangely returns true
    // despite the fact that thisIsNotNull is a valid instance of type XML
}

When currentChild.appendChild is passed the string "null", it first converts it to a root XML element with text null, and then tests that element against the null literal. This is a weak equality test, so either the XML containing null is coerced to the null type, or the null type is coerced to a root xml element containing the string "null", and the test passes where it arguably should fail. One fix might be to always use strict equality tests when checking XML (or anything, really) for "nullness."

Solution

The only reasonable workaround I can think of, short of fixing this bug in every damn version of ActionScript, is to test fields for "null" and escape them as CDATA values.

CDATA values are the most appropriate way to mutate an entire text value that would otherwise cause encoding/decoding problems. Hex encoding, for instance, is meant for individual characters. CDATA values are preferred when you're escaping the entire text of an element. The biggest reason for this is that it maintains human readability.

Can some body explain me the differences between a Document style and RPC style webservices?

There are two communication style models that are used to translate a WSDL binding to a SOAP message body. They are: Document & RPC

The advantage of using a Document style model is that you can structure the SOAP body any way you want it as long as the content of the SOAP message body is any arbitrary XML instance. The Document style is also referred to as Message-Oriented style.

However, with an RPC style model, the structure of the SOAP request body must contain both the operation name and the set of method parameters. The RPC style model assumes a specific structure to the XML instance contained in the message body.

Furthermore, there are two encoding use models that are used to translate a WSDL binding to a SOAP message. They are: literal, and encoded

When using a literal use model, the body contents should conform to a user-defined XML-schema(XSD) structure. The advantage is two-fold. For one, you can validate the message body with the user-defined XML-schema, moreover, you can also transform the message using a transformation language like XSLT.

With a (SOAP) encoded use model, the message has to use XSD datatypes, but the structure of the message need not conform to any user-defined XML schema. This makes it difficult to validate the message body or use XSLT based transformations on the message body.

The combination of the different style and use models give us four different ways to translate a WSDL binding to a SOAP message.

Document/literal
Document/encoded
RPC/literal
RPC/encoded

I would recommend that you read this article entitled Which style of WSDL should I use? by Russell Butek which has a nice discussion of the different style and use models to translate a WSDL binding to a SOAP message, and their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Once the artifacts are received, in both styles of communication, I invoke the method on the port. Now, this does not differ in RPC style and Document style. So what is the difference and where is that difference visible?

The place where you can find the difference is the "RESPONSE"!

RPC Style:

package com.sample;
 
import java.util.ArrayList;
import javax.jws.WebService;
import javax.jws.soap.SOAPBinding;
import javax.jws.soap.SOAPBinding.Style;

@WebService
@SOAPBinding(style=Style.RPC)
public interface StockPrice { 

    public String getStockPrice(String stockName); 

    public ArrayList getStockPriceList(ArrayList stockNameList); 
}

The SOAP message for second operation will have empty output and will look like:

RPC Style Response:

<ns2:getStockPriceListResponse 
       xmlns:ns2="http://sample.com/">
    <return/>
</ns2:getStockPriceListResponse>
</S:Body>
</S:Envelope>

Document Style:

package com.sample;
 
import java.util.ArrayList;
import javax.jws.WebService;
import javax.jws.soap.SOAPBinding;
import javax.jws.soap.SOAPBinding.Style;
 
@WebService
@SOAPBinding(style=Style.DOCUMENT)
public interface StockPrice {
 
    public String getStockPrice(String stockName);
 
    public ArrayList getStockPriceList(ArrayList stockNameList);
}

If we run the client for the above SEI, the output is:

123 [123, 456]

This output shows that ArrayList elements are getting exchanged between the web service and client. This change has been done only by the changing the style attribute of SOAPBinding annotation. The SOAP message for the second method with richer data type is shown below for reference:

Document Style Response:

<ns2:getStockPriceListResponse 
       xmlns:ns2="http://sample.com/">
<return xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"  
        xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
        xsi:type="xs:string">123</return>
<return xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
        xsi:type="xs:string">456</return>
</ns2:getStockPriceListResponse>
</S:Body>
</S:Envelope>

Conclusion

• As you would have noticed in the two SOAP response messages that it is possible to validate the SOAP response message in case of DOCUMENT style but not in RPC style web services.
• The basic disadvantage of using RPC style is that it doesn’t support richer data types and that of using Document style is that it brings some complexity in the form of XSD for defining the richer data types.
• The choice of using one out of these depends upon the operation/method requirements and the expected clients.

Similarly, in what way SOAP over HTTP differ from XML over HTTP? After all SOAP is also XML document with SOAP namespace. So what is the difference here?

Why do we need a standard like SOAP? By exchanging XML documents over HTTP, two programs can exchange rich, structured information without the introduction of an additional standard such as SOAP to explicitly describe a message envelope format and a way to encode structured content.

SOAP provides a standard so that developers do not have to invent a custom XML message format for every service they want to make available. Given the signature of the service method to be invoked, the SOAP specification prescribes an unambiguous XML message format. Any developer familiar with the SOAP specification, working in any programming language, can formulate a correct SOAP XML request for a particular service and understand the response from the service by obtaining the following service details.

• Service name
• Method names implemented by the service
• Method signature of each method
• Address of the service implementation (expressed as a URI)

Using SOAP streamlines the process for exposing an existing software component as a Web service since the method signature of the service identifies the XML document structure used for both the request and the response.