SOAP Message Content-Length

I am working with someone to properly understand how to call an ASP.NET web service from PeopleSoft. After several tries, I finally saw down at the keyboard Sunday night and put together some code to call the web service from a Java application. I learned very quickly that if you do not have all your ducks in a row, most likely, the SOAP request will not work.

The thing that I struggled with the most last night was getting the Content-Length value set properly. When I thought I had it set just right, I would use the code to access a different web service with different parameter names and it would no longer work.

I finally figured out after a lot of trial and error that the Content-Length value in the POST header for the SOAP message only includes the length of the content in the SOAP message body, which is encompassed by the tags.