Significance/Semantics of this XSchema fragment (in WSDL)

[Joel Riedesel <jr...@jnana.com>]

I'm hoping that I'm not repeating a question here, but this seems
to be a hard thing to search for.  It's been a little while since I've
written some soap clients.


The question:

I'm encountering the following fragment of XSchema in some WSDL.

What I particularly care about is the, uh, what seems to me to be,
underspecified element ref called "s:schema" followed by the s:any tag.

When I run my soap client and get data back, the resulting data seems
to then be dynamically specified with schema description and then
real data in the s:any tag location.

Is this sort of semantic specified somewhere?  Of is this unique to MS
SOAP tools?  Or what?

(It bothers me that I can't simply read the WSDL and know what I'm
getting back - isn't that what the point of WSDL is?)

Thanks for any pointers, etc.

Joel




- <s:element name="SearchWordResponse">
- <s:complexType>
- <s:sequence>
- <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="SearchWordResult">
- <s:complexType>
- <s:sequence>
  <s:element ref="s:schema" /> 
  <s:any /> 
  </s:sequence>
  </s:complexType>
  </s:element>
  </s:sequence>
  </s:complexType>
  </s:element>