In SOAP, there is no concept of a "method" - with some restrictions,  
you can basically pass any XML as the SOAP body and add some metadata  
to the envelope's header.

Possibly, you're talking about WSDL, which has a concept of an  
operation, so maybe you mean that you want to get by with a single  
WSDL interface (portType in 1.1) that has just one operation (or at  
least, a fixed set of operations). Even then, passing the XML as a  
string is a bad idea since you'd need to escape it. It's not great,  
but much better, to use an xsd:any.

If you don't care for generating interface-specific code from a WSDL  
file anyway, you might want to consider forgetting about SOAP and  
WSDL and use plain HTTP in a RESTful manner instead.

Stefan
--
Stefan Tilkov, http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/

On May 31, 2007, at 4:13 PM, Yannick Beynet wrote:

> Exactly ! I want to know If there is some "best practise" for
> developing an XML query language.
> Our problem is :
> We want to add a soap gateway to access an old legacy system. This
> system is very complex , many request, with many arguments. We don't
> want to add one soap method for any sort of request. We prefer adding
> just one method with one arguments : a string. This string should be
> our query (written in XML).
>
>
> 2007/5/31, Michael Kay <mike@s...>:
>> >
>> > Sorry, but you need to explain better; you want an XML query
>> > language, but not Xquery because it's an XML query language?
>> >
>>
>> I *suspect* that what he wants is a query language for some kind of
>> (unspecified) non-XML data but which is expressed using XML  
>> syntax. Perhaps.
>>
>> Michael Kay
>> http://www.saxonica.com/
>>
>>
>
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