As described above in SOAP Binding, the document style does not use SOAP encoding; it's simply based on XML schema. In order to aid effective web service development provision is made for two DOWS types depending on how the operation should process input parameters and return values:
- "Method parameters" - Where Axis 1.4 is used to deserialize the SOAP message for input parameters into Java object(s) and to serialize the returned Java object(s) into XML.
- "XML document" - Where the developer has direct access to the XML message contained in the SOAP body, instead of turning it into Java objects. In this case an XML document is the input type and return type. An XML schema is exposed in the WSDL to describe the expected input message. Support is also provided for validating SOAP request messages against the specified schema. This is also referred to as a message-style web service.
See Modeling Legacy Web Service Classes in Rational Software Architect for details on how to model these web service styles.