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SOAP envelope

<env:Header>

The optional SOAP container for routing, security, tracing, transactions, and other processing metadata.

Header carries extensible blocks from application namespaces. SOAP attributes such as mustUnderstand and role tell nodes which blocks they must process.

Each immediate child is a header block with processing semantics, not an arbitrary metadata field, and Header must appear before Body.

Format
SOAP envelope
Namespace
SOAP 1.2 envelope
Parent
<env:Envelope>
How many
Zero or one, before Body.

What it contains

  • application header blocksany numberNormally namespace-qualified.

Cardinality and constraints

Zero or one, before Body.

  • May contain namespace-qualified header blocks.
  • Cannot follow the Body element.

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.

Where it reaches

Related elements

All 49 elements

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