The Body element is mandatory and contains the message payload. This payload might be a request or a response message. If it is a request message, it is initiated by a service consumer and could contain instructions to the receiver to provide some services. A response message is sent by a service provider and could contain results of the corresponding request message.

A SOAP message can have only one Body element. The Body element can contain an XML document fragment as its child element. These child elements might be namespace-qualified. The Body element can contain a Fault element, which is defined in the XML schema for SOAP.

In sequence, the Body element follows the Header element, if the Header element is present.

In the code example, getBook is a child element of the Body element and the path in the code example is the namespaceURI.