This is a follow-up discussion from http://forums.asp.net/t/1332722.aspx?PageIndex=2. I noticed we stopped talking about Peter's problem some time ago.
The discussion had become one of passing "XML strings" to a web service in order to permit optional parameters, a dynamic web service, and things like that.
My contention is that this is a solution without a requirement. It is something that we can do, which does not imply that anyone needs us to do it.
First of all, if you need to send XML, then send XML. Do not send a string that happens to have XML embedded in it. ASMX web services may accept parameters of type XmlElement or XmlDocument, and may return the same. I've done this in a commercial web service, when it was easier to implement the service this way than by creating a very large complicated class to hold the same data. The internal processing of t ...
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