There's a bug in the behaviour of JBoss with regard to serializing service-specific exceptions. Regardless of the exception's JavaBean properties, its XML Schema definition, and exception- and java-xml-type- mapping information supplied, JBoss always adds a gratuitous 'message' element, whereby making the model content of the soapenv:Fault's detail element non-conforming to the the service-specific exception's schema and leading to interoperability issues.

Below is an example of an envelope returned by JBoss:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<soapenv:Body>
<soapenv:Fault>
<faultcode>soapenv:Client</faultcode>
<faultstring>Error</faultstring>
<detail>
<ns1:AlturaException xmlns:ns1="http://application.alturadev.compuware.com">
<message>Error</message>
<key>ERR_GenericException</key>
<values xsi:nil="1"/>
</ns1:AlturaException>
</detail>
</soapenv:Fault>
</soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

The corresponding XML Schema excetpt looks like this:
<xsd:complexType name="AlturaException">
<xsd:sequence>
<xsd:element name="key" type="xsd:string"/>
<xsd:element name="values" type="xsd:string" nillable="true" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
</xsd:sequence>
</xsd:complexType>

The relevant portion of the JAX-RPC mapping DD is:
<java-xml-type-mapping>
<java-type>com.compuware.alturadev.application.AlturaException</java-type>
<root-type-qname xmlns:typeNS="http://application.alturadev.compuware.com">typeNS:AlturaException</root-type-qname>
<qname-scope>complexType</qname-scope>
<variable-mapping>
<java-variable-name>key</java-variable-name>
<xml-element-name>key</xml-element-name>
</variable-mapping>
<variable-mapping>
<java-variable-name>values</java-variable-name>
<xml-element-name>values</xml-element-name>
</variable-mapping>
</java-xml-type-mapping>

I've been wrestling with this problem in JBoss 4.0.2 for about two hours before I devcided to consult the relevant source code. I've found the following code(org/jboss/axis/utils/BeanInfo.java, Line 155):

// Include the message property
if (isThrowable)

{ List bpList = new ArrayList(); bpList.add(new PropertyDescriptor("message", Throwable.class, "getMessage", null)); bpList.addAll(Arrays.asList(result)); result = new PropertyDescriptor[bpList.size()]; bpList.toArray(result); }

this explains why JBoss always disregards XML Schema, exception- and java-xml-type- mapping information and serializes this element. As a matter of fact this non-conformant behaviour is discontinued as of Axis 1.2.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Andrei.