GeoNames Forum

Hallo,

I have Problem customizing a webservice (findNearbyPostalCodes) in Visual Studio 2005 when using "Add web reference". It always says "unknown document type". But the XML file shown is ok.
Other webservices are working.

What's going wrong?
Can somebody help me (I am very new in using webservices)?

Thanks a lot.

Regards

Martin

Hi Martin

You say that 'other web services are working'. Does this refer to other GeoNames services or services from other providers?
I am not familiar with Visual Studio. Could it be that they expect a SOAP web service? Our services are nearly all REST in XML or JSON.

Best

Marc

Hi Marc,

sorry for late answer.

No, I did not used geonames webservices in the past, only from other providers.

Here's the error message in Visual Studio (only in German). Perhaps you can help me to interpret it:

Das Dokument bei URL 'http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodes?wsdl&postalcode=68542&country=DE&radius=6' wurde nicht als bekannter Dokumenttyp erkannt.
Die Fehlermeldungen zu jedem bekannten Typ können möglicherweise beim Beheben des Problems nützlich sein:
- Bericht von 'DISCO-Dokument' ist 'Das Discovery-Dokument bei URL 'http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodes?wsdl&postalcode=68542&country=DE&radius=6' wurde nicht gefunden.'.
- Das Dokumentformat wurde nicht erkannt.
- Bericht von 'WSDL-Dokument' ist 'Fehler im XML-Dokument (2,2).'.
- <geonames xmlns=''> wurde nicht erwartet.
- Bericht von 'XML-Schema' ist 'Das Stammelement eines W3C XML-Schemas muss <schema> und sein Namespace 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema' lauten.'.

Thanks a lot.

Martin

Hi Martin

No problem with German. I am from the German speaking part of Switzerland.

The error message speaks about a WSDL document. I am not familiary with the Visual Studio product line, but it seems to look for a SOAP service. GeoNames is using REST services which have become popular in recent years and may not yet be included in a 2005 release.

I guess you will have to write the web service access your self. It should not be too dificult. Read the document at the url, parse the xml and enjoy.

Best

Marc