We are working together with another firm. our application communicates with the other application through WCF on our side and a custom implemented java wsdl handler on the other side. They specify the wsdl format and one of the rules is that a specific string cannot contain more then 15 characters. (normally it's 60, but i take 15 for easy example reasons)

When we try to send the following string to them we get an error that the string is too long according to the wsdl:

"example & test" > this is a string of 14 characters, so it should be allowed

the microsoft wcf parser translates this to "example & test" . This encoded string is 18 characters long.

Now what is the standaard behavior to check a maxlength defined in a message? Is it the encoded message or the decoded message? I would think it's the decoded message , but i ain't sure. If it is the encoded message, how should we handle this so we would know how we have to split the string?