I am writing a method that takes a string array but returns an element. Element foo(String[] arg) {} To invoke this method I have set call object's encoding to be NS_URI_LITERAL_XML and have set parameter's encoding style to be NS_URI_SOAP_ENC. Now this failed to work. It looks like when serializing String[], though it understand to use NS_URI_SOAP_ENC for array , when it tries to serialize String it is using the default encoding which is NS_URI_LITERAL_XML. Any suggestion as to what can be done to work around this problem? Thanks, Elaine