Resolving Policy Xpress SOAP Call Failures Caused by Ampersands

Products

• CA Identity Manager
• CA Identity Governance
• CA Identity Portal

Issue/Introduction

When configuring Policy Xpress to perform SOAP calls, including an ampersand (&) in the input payload (e.g., within department information) may cause the request to fail with an AxisFault error. This error occurs because the ampersand is a reserved character in XML and breaks the request structure.

Environment

Identity Manager 14.5

Cause

The org.apache.axis2.AxisFault error occurs because the SOAP processor interprets the ampersand as the start of an XML entity reference, which remains unclosed, resulting in the error: The reference to entity "X" must end with the ';' delimiter.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, you must ensure the input data containing special characters is properly escaped or wrapped in a CDATA section to prevent the SOAP engine from interpreting the ampersand as XML markup.

1. Locate the Policy Xpress rule configuration for the SOAP call.
2. Identify the parameter containing the special character (e.g., the department name).
3. Wrap the input value in a CDATA section to allow the XML parser to treat the content as raw data:

   <![CDATA[YourDataWith&Symbol]]>

4. Alternatively, ensure the XML content is properly escaped before being sent to the endpoint (e.g., replace & with &).
5. Save the rule and test the SOAP request again to verify the AxisFault error is resolved.

Additional Information

For further information see the article How to escape ampersand (&) in soap UI

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