SOAP validation - help me defend Axis!

["Pascale, Peter H." <Pe...@pearson.com>]

A customer of ours exposes some web services for app integration. We use
Axis, they use Weblogic. In their WSDL, some fields are required, and some
aren't. For the most part, we've done our homework to make sure that we're
always populating required fields. In at least one case we're not, so when
we fail to populate a required field, the WSDL looks like this:

<dayPhone xsi:nil="true"/>

Now for the questions:

1) Is this valid SOAP according to the SOAP spec? I assume yes but want to
confirm.
2) If the WSDL indicates that DayPhone is a required field, then can it be
said that this is NOT valid SOAP according to the WSDL?
3) The client uses Weblogic, so they've got all sort of tools and features.
They question whether we should even be sending this message to them. It
sounded like they expected us to be able to validate the SOAP message
(against the WSDL I assume). In this case, the validation would detect that
this is not valid SOAP and the request could be avoided. Does Axis provide
this validation? If so, how do I configure it? If not, has anyone written
open source or commercial validation handlers for Axis?

Thanks all, loving Axis and want to stay that way.

Peter



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