<story><title>An employee, whose last name is Null, kills our employee lookup app</title><url>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-can-i-pass-the-string-null-through-wsdl-soap-from-as3-to-coldfusion-web</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wpietri</author><text>Wow. I love that the S stands for Simple. &quot;You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.&quot;</text></item><item><author>NelsonMinar</author><text>This is funny, but it&apos;s also a real world example of the kind of encoding nightmare that made SOAP RPC encoding really awkward. Various SOAP toolkits used to serialize a missing value as the empty string, or a literal value like &quot;null&quot; or 0, or all sorts of awfulness. I think the correct thing for the spec is to set xsi:nil=&quot;true&quot; as an attribute on the XML tag in question, but IIRC about half the toolkits didn&apos;t understand that.&lt;p&gt;(I speak in the past tense of SOAP because I am an optimist.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>haberman</author><text>Indeed it does: &lt;a href=&quot;http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-stands-for-simple/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>An employee, whose last name is Null, kills our employee lookup app</title><url>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-can-i-pass-the-string-null-through-wsdl-soap-from-as3-to-coldfusion-web</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wpietri</author><text>Wow. I love that the S stands for Simple. &quot;You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.&quot;</text></item><item><author>NelsonMinar</author><text>This is funny, but it&apos;s also a real world example of the kind of encoding nightmare that made SOAP RPC encoding really awkward. Various SOAP toolkits used to serialize a missing value as the empty string, or a literal value like &quot;null&quot; or 0, or all sorts of awfulness. I think the correct thing for the spec is to set xsi:nil=&quot;true&quot; as an attribute on the XML tag in question, but IIRC about half the toolkits didn&apos;t understand that.&lt;p&gt;(I speak in the past tense of SOAP because I am an optimist.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raverbashing</author><text>The S in SOAP is for Simple as the L in LDAP is for lightweight</text></comment>