Tracing Serialization / Deserialization Issues in SAP Web Services

[Former Member]

I thought this might be worth documenting to maybe save someone’s time getting a resolution to web service Serialization / Deserialization issues.  Recently I was asked to consume a 3^rd party WSDL. This meant I had to create a consumer proxy in SAP for the abap to use at runtime.  Everything went well with the proxy generation (at least no errors were reported).  However, once I tried to consume the proxy, an exception was thrown when executing the call to the web service method. 

The exception is seen below:

“SOAP:1,027 SRT: Serialization / Deserialization Failed”

After digging a little deeper (SRT_UTIL) and checking the logs in the “Web Service Utilities: Error Log”, I found the following information:

This led me to take a look at the WSDL and found that the date format of these fields looks as follows:

<SubmissionTime>2001-12-31T12:00:00</SubmissionTime>

<CompletionTime>2001-12-31T12:00:00</CompletionTime>

Obviously SAP was having an issue with the date format.  I then went to the Proxy Service and took at look at the external view:

Inspecting the “SubmissionTime” and “CompletionTime” Technical Type, I noticed that they has been set to the following:   XSDDATETIME_Z

From the dictionary, you can see the type corresponds to:

Since the data being returned from the web service does not conform to a decimal format, a change was needed.  We needed something that could handle this format:

<SubmissionTime>2001-12-31T12:00:00</SubmissionTime>

<CompletionTime>2001-12-31T12:00:00</CompletionTime>

There is another format which is more appropriate:  XSDDATETIME_ISO

So for each of the external view fields in the proxy defined as XSDDATETIME_Z, I switched them to:

After the change, everything worked like a charm..

Bottom line; don’t expect the proxy generator to get everything correct.  It’s pretty good, but it’s not perfect.