Hello,
  A customer of ours wants us to provide a web service that they can access WITHOUT SOAP. They just want to do an HTTP POST to some URL I provide. They will put the XML in the data of the post. We want to do this in .NET in C#.

  OK, so I figured out how to do it, but it seems very backward. I keep thinking there is a better way. Here is what we did:

1) We have a .NET web service that takes NO parameters.
2) It gets the XML with the following lines:
   String postData = this.Context.Request.Form.ToString();
   sxml = System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlDecode(postData);
3) Then, it uses standard XML tools to extract the data from his XML:
    doc.LoadXml(sxml);
    XmlNodeList nodeLst = doc.GetElementsByTagName("OrderInfo");
    ... etc.
4) Finally, it builds an XML result string (a character string) and returns it with
    return sResult;

Is this the best way to hanlde this? It seems that I'm bypassing all of the cool .NET web service tools by getting it from the Request.Form.Tostring. But I don't see a better way.

Also (an annoyance I'll probably figure out sooner or later) when it comes back to him he is seen > instead of GREATER THAN and < instead of LESS THAN in the XML result string. Which setting is causing that to happen?

Thanks much!
Dave

I can't think of a much better way. Yes, you are passing up all the nifty .NET functionality of web services. I can't imagine why they would be so adament about not using SOAP. The only other option would be to use the querystring, but that would be somewhat limiting.

When you return a "<" in xml as part of the data, it get escaped because if it didn't it would break the validation of a properly formed XML string/document:

<xml>
   <data>If x = 5 and y = 10 then 5 < 10 </data>
</xml>

The "<" implies the beginning of a tag where there really isn't one. So it get escaped:

<xml>
   <data>If x = 5 and y = 10 then 5 &lt; 10 </data>
</xml>

The consumer would have to unescape the string. (Something that wouldn't be necessary if they used SOAP, I think. Certainly not if they did it in .NET.)