View SOAP Response Example

A real SOAP response you can view as a sortable table or a foldable tree. Below the sample, every part of the message is explained — the Envelope, the optional Header, the Body, and what a Fault looks like — plus how to use Pretty JSON & XML to read any SOAP response in seconds.

The sample

A typical SOAP 1.1 response from a web service that returns a list of orders. Note the Envelope wrapper, a Header with a correlation ID, and a Body that holds the repeated Order elements:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
  <soap:Header>
    <CorrelationId>a1b2c3d4-9f10-4e21-8c33-77aabbccddee</CorrelationId>
  </soap:Header>
  <soap:Body>
    <GetOrdersResponse xmlns="https://example.com/orders">
      <Order>
        <Id>1001</Id>
        <Customer>Ada Lovelace</Customer>
        <Total>149.00</Total>
        <Status>Shipped</Status>
      </Order>
      <Order>
        <Id>1002</Id>
        <Customer>Alan Turing</Customer>
        <Total>72.50</Total>
        <Status>Processing</Status>
      </Order>
      <Order>
        <Id>1003</Id>
        <Customer>Grace Hopper</Customer>
        <Total>318.99</Total>
        <Status>Shipped</Status>
      </Order>
    </GetOrdersResponse>
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

What is a SOAP response?

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is an XML messaging format used by web services, especially in enterprise, banking, and legacy systems. A SOAP response is always wrapped in a <soap:Envelope>, which contains up to two children: an optional <soap:Header> for metadata, and a required <soap:Body> for the actual payload.

• Envelope — the outermost element that marks the message as SOAP and declares the SOAP namespace
• Header — optional metadata such as authentication tokens, correlation IDs, or routing hints
• Body — the response payload: the data the service returned, or a Fault if something went wrong

What a SOAP Fault looks like

When a SOAP service hits an error, the Body contains a <soap:Fault> instead of a result. It carries a faultcode (a short machine-readable category), a faultstring (a human-readable message), and sometimes a detail block with extra context:

<soap:Body>
  <soap:Fault>
    <faultcode>soap:Client</faultcode>
    <faultstring>Unknown order id</faultstring>
  </soap:Fault>
</soap:Body>

Paste a faulting response into the viewer and the Fault fields surface as their own labelled rows, so you can read the code and message without scanning raw XML.

Why view a SOAP response as a table?

SOAP responses are notoriously verbose — namespace prefixes on every tag, deep nesting, and wrapper elements that bury the data you actually care about. Reading them as raw XML is slow and error-prone. Reading the repeated records as a table lets you:

• Sort by any column — for example by Total to find the largest order, or by Status to group results
• Search across every record at once for a customer name or order id
• Spot missing or empty fields instantly — one blank cell in a column is easy to see
• Compare two responses from staging and production side by side

How Pretty JSON & XML handles SOAP

SOAP is just XML, so the viewer treats it the same way it treats any feed or document. When you paste a SOAP response, it:

1. Parses the Envelope and looks past the Header and Body wrappers to find the real payload
2. Detects the repeated element inside the Body (here, <Order>) and renders one row per record
3. Chooses the most useful fields as columns based on frequency and naming — Id, Customer, Total, Status
4. Keeps single-value Header fields like the correlation ID visible as context above the table

Click any row to expand the full record, including nested elements, attributes, or namespace-prefixed fields. Everything is parsed locally in your browser — no SOAP payload is ever uploaded to a server.

Open the viewer and paste your own SOAP response →