If you still have legacy ASP.net webservices, the old asmx file variety, and you need to do a quick test from a server that doesn’t have fancy testing tools. This article provided an easy way to test the service with just a browser and an HTML file.

Test Service GET Method

To test the service’s GET methods you can use a browser and a specially formatted URL.

http://domain/service.asmx/method?parameter=value

For example, I have

• a domain, legacywebservices.com
• it hosts a service, oldservice.asmx
• that has a GET method, GetOldData
• that accepts parameters, ID and Name

The URL to test this web service method would be

http://legacywebservices.com/oldservice.asmx/GetOldData?ID=1000&Name=Some Old Data

This would return an XML file containing the response from the service or an error to troubleshoot.

Test Service POST Method

To test the service’s POST methods you can use a simple HTML file containing a form. Just open the form in your browser, enter the values, and submit.

<form method="POST" action="http://domain/service.asmx/method"><div><input type="text" name="parameter" /></div><div><input type="submit" value="method" /></div></form>

For example, I have

• a domain, legacywebservices.com
• it hosts a service, oldservice.asmx
• that has a Post method, SaveOldData
• that accepts parameters, ID and Name

The HTML form to test this web service method would be

This would return an XML file containing the response from the service or an error to troubleshoot.

Troubleshoot

If you get a System.Net.WebException error message that indicates the request format is unrecognized, you need to do some configuration to get it to work as explained in this KB. Just add this to the system.web node in the web.config of the web service and you should be good to go.

<webServices> <protocols> <add name="HttpGet"/> <add name="HttpPost"/> </protocols> </webServices>

Conclusion

If you are sentenced to maintaining and testing legacy ASP.net web services, these simple tests can help uncover pesky connectivity, data and other issues that don’t return proper exceptions or errors because your app is old and dumb (even if you wrote it).