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SOAP envelope

<env:Body>

The required SOAP container for an application payload or a single Fault response.

Body is the message part delivered to the ultimate receiver. Normal payload children come from an application vocabulary rather than the SOAP namespace.

When processing fails, Body contains Fault instead of a successful response payload. SOAP 1.2 permits only one Fault child.

What it contains

Cardinality and constraints

Exactly one, as the final child of Envelope.

  • Must be present even when the payload is empty.
  • A Fault replaces rather than accompanies a successful payload.

What our validator does

The XML validator checks that both examples are well-formed. It does not enforce this vocabulary's semantic content model, so the broken example is intentionally reported as valid XML.

We do not catch this one

This document is well-formed XML but violates a SOAP or XML Schema vocabulary rule. XML syntax alone cannot detect that defect; use a SOAP-aware processor or an XSD validator when conformance matters.

Broken and fixed

Both documents below are well-formed XML — that is the point of this corpus — and both are run through the validator on every test run. The verdicts here are what it returned, not what we expect it to.

broken
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<env:Envelope xmlns:env="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
  <env:Body><m:getPrice xmlns:m="urn:example:catalog"><m:sku>42</m:sku></m:getPrice></env:Body>
  <env:Header><m:trace xmlns:m="urn:example:meta">abc-123</m:trace></env:Header>
</env:Envelope>
No issue reported. This defect passes our checks.
fixed
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<env:Envelope xmlns:env="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
  <env:Header><m:trace xmlns:m="urn:example:meta">abc-123</m:trace></env:Header>
  <env:Body><m:getPrice xmlns:m="urn:example:catalog"><m:sku>42</m:sku></m:getPrice></env:Body>
</env:Envelope>
No errors. Warnings may remain — a conforming feed can still be missing a self link — but nothing here is wrong.

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