SOAP-based web APIs are quite rare, less popular by far than REST. The examples in this section are based on a simple SOAP service I wrote for this book.
The service is available on GitHub as a Visual Studio solution: https://github.com/indented-automation/SimpleSOAP.
The solution should be downloaded, opened in Visual Studio (2015 or 2017, Community Edition or better), and debugging should be started by pressing F5. A browser page will be opened, which will show the port number the service is operating on. A 403 error may be displayed; this can be ignored.
This service is not a well designed service; it has been contrived to expose similar patterns in its method calls to those seen in real SOAP services.
A ReadMe file accompanies the project. Common problems running the project will be noted there.
Alternative services include older versions of SQL Server Reporting Services, which are extensively documented: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/reportservice2010?view=sqlserver-2016. SQL Server Reporting Services 2017 and newer use a REST API.
The discovery based approaches explored in this section should be applicable to any SOAP based service.