Domino Web Service response converts less-than sign ("<") to "&lt;"

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To all:

 I have written a Domino Web Service that returns an XML document as a string.  The method looks like this:

Function GetDXL( strServerName As String, strReplicaID As String, strUniversalID As String, wsError As WS_FAULT ) As String

All it does is pass those parameters to a Script Library, which passes back an XML document as a string.

 The Web Service works fine on our development machine running Domino 8.0.2 on Windows XP Pro.  The Web Service response from that machine looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>

etc., etc…

 Our QA and Production servers run Domino 8.0.1 on Windows Server 2003.  The Web Service response looks like this:

<?xml version=“1.0”?>

<document form=‘Memo’ xmlns=‘http://www.lotus.com/dxl’ version=‘8.0’ replicaid=‘852575C9007ED803’ maintenanceversion=‘1.0’>etc., etc…</document>

That is to say, every single instance of the less-than sign (“<”) in the XML document, from the first tag to the last, is converted to its HTML entity name “<”. It is the only character so affected.

 We placed the Web Service on a Domino 8.5 server with the same (bad) results.



 In every case, we have tested using the same database with the same e-mail documents.



 It seems clear that some setting, either in the OS or in Domino, is causing this phenomenon.  We have explored the possibility that it is a UTF-7 vs UTF-8 encoding problem, but that would not explain the successful responses in our development environment.



 We are presently getting around the problem by encoding the string response in base64.  The web consumer must then decode the base64 before using the XML.  We would, nonetheless, like to know why this behavior is occurring.



 I appreciate any insights.



 Sincerely,

 Joseph Davoli