Peter, thats why I asked you if your method returns a string as an XML doc.....specificly our web service returns an XML doc as a STRING....SOAP only knows the return parameter as a STRING....This allows me to do the String returnvalue = ((String)ret.getValue()); Now return value contains the following... "<person><firstname>yy</firstname><lastname>xx</lastname></person>" **NOTE THE QUOTES.... Now return value looks like the document that I returned from my WebService (ie the server) which assembles a document then writes it out to string and returns the STRING to the client...now I can load up a DOM document with that string and or Parse it with a SAX parser and load up a Java object/bean etc... (String)ret.getValue() does NOT return you the SOAP XML envelope information and or payload...to do that you need to get into the Call object... hth Doug