When a wsdl is generated from a custom service all elements are exposed as nillable="true" and minoccurs="0" It would be useful if there was an equivalent of .NET's System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute which could help filter out bad data before being processed by business logic. At the moment mandatory fields have to be checked by writing x++ code to make sure that the data is there. Pushing this responsibility back to the calling system to ensure that mandatory fields have data would reduce code and improve performance