A Fault element can only appear once in a SOAP message. If this element is present, it must appear as a child element of the Body element.

The SOAP Fault element has the following sub elements:

• <faultcode> : A code for identifying the fault
• <faultstring> : A human readable explanation of the fault
• <faultactor> : Information about who caused the fault to happen
• <detail> : Holds application specific error information related to the Body element

The faultcode element indicates what fault occurred and it is of type QName. Several existing categories of fault code are defined, all in the http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/ namespace.

When describing faults, in the faultcode element the faultcode values defined below must be used.

The faultstring element is of type string . It provides a human-readable description of whatever fault occurred.

The faultactor element is of type uriReference. It indicates the source of the fault.

The detail element is used to carry application-specific error information. It may be annotated with any number of attributes from any namespace, and may have any number of namespace-qualified element children. The detail element must be present if the fault is the result of the recipient being unable to process the Body element. This element is not used to provide error information in the case of the recipient being unable to process an element child of the Header element. In such cases, error information is placed inside the Header element.