Consume SOAP services with HttpClient in .NET

Consume SOAP service with HttpClient in .NET doesn’t have to be hard.

In recent days I need to consume some soap services in .NET 6, and I need to review some concepts about SOAP services in C#.

After doing some research I found some examples using HttpWebRequest, but this class is marked as obsolete in .NET 6 and is suggested to use HttpClient instead, as is showed in the following image.

Next I will show you the code using HttpWebRequest.

public class SoapWebRequest
{
        public string WsdlEnpdoint { get; set; } 

        public HttpWebRequest CreateSOAPWebRequest()
        {
            //Making Web Request    
            HttpWebRequest Req = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(WsdlEnpdoint); 
            Req.ContentType = "text/xml;charset=\"utf-8\"";
            Req.Accept = "text/xml";
            //HTTP method    
            Req.Method = "POST";
            //return HttpWebRequest    
            return Req;
        }

        public ReceptionResponse InvokeService(string base64XML)
        {
            //Calling CreateSOAPWebRequest method  
            HttpWebRequest request = CreateSOAPWebRequest();

            XmlDocument SOAPReqBody = new XmlDocument();
            //SOAP Body Request  
            SOAPReqBody.LoadXml(GetSoapXml(base64XML));

            using (Stream stream = request.GetRequestStream())
            {
                SOAPReqBody.Save(stream);
            }

            //Geting response from request  
            using (WebResponse Serviceres = request.GetResponse())
            {
                using (StreamReader rd = new StreamReader(Serviceres.GetResponseStream()))
                {
                    //reading stream  
                    var ServiceResult = rd.ReadToEnd();
                    //... process response result (deserialization, save on db)
                }
            }
            return result;
        }
    }

The same result and more cleaner could be obtained with HttpClient as is showed in the next code :

string url = "";
HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
HttpRequestMessage httpRequestMessage = new HttpRequestMessage
{
    RequestUri = new Uri(url),
    Method = HttpMethod.Post,
};
httpRequestMessage.Headers.Accept.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeWithQualityHeaderValue("text/xml"));

string strContent = GetSoapXml();
StringContent content = new StringContent(strContent, Encoding.UTF8, "text/xml");
httpRequestMessage.Content = content;

var response = client.SendAsync(httpRequestMessage).Result;
string contentResponse = response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync().Result;
//... process request result (Deserialization, Save on DB)

In the previous example I am using POST method, but it could be change to any http method.

I hope this post could help you.

Check my previous post: How To Make an API with Azure Functions and OpenAPI Support