So there’s this SOAP api I have to use (not by choice, and not the only one i have to use) that returns a bunch of XML nodes to confirm the data sent made it and checks out - pretty standard stuff yea.

Now every once in a while it doesn’t respond (as far as I could tell) so today I wrapped a debug around the soap call, error handler and responses and threw a bunch of messages it’s way to try and force it not to respond in order to be able to put some decent error handling in place.

Well it wouldn’t fail.
100 messages .... all responses good
100 more.... all responses good

And then 100 more.... all respond with “x”, plain text not XML as expected!

Wtf is this shit!!!!!

Many months into the project, we discovered that the client doesn't have a REST API for the data we needed from their side available at all - it's a legacy SOAP service.

I somehow got our Node.JS backend to do SOAP calls and use the XML results.

I'm not sure if I should feel proud or dirty at this point.