I was experiencing an odd failure today that drove me crazy for about an hour.  The error message I was getting back was not in line with the actual behavior.

I was sending a getUpdated() and getDeleted() for "Contact" that was over 30 days old.  Since this is not documented that there is a limitation, I was getting back the following exception message:

AxisFault
 faultCode: {http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/}Server.userException
 faultSubcode: 
 faultString: java.lang.IllegalStateException
 faultActor: 
 faultNode: 
 faultDetail: 
 {http://xml.apache.org/axis/}stackTrace: java.lang.IllegalStateException

While I'm use to seeing the exceptions, this wasn't being returned as a normal SOAP message.  Possibly a bug in Axis.  But, looking at the HTTP Response, I noticed that it was coming back as an HTTP 500 Result.  Is this what's causing the issue and not giving back the correct exception?

POST /services/Soap/c/3.0 HTTP/1.0
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
Accept: application/soap+xml, application/dime, multipart/related, text/*
User-Agent: Axis/1.1
Host: na1-api.salesforce.com
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
SOAPAction: ""
Content-Length: 1006

25


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Contact
2002-04-01T08:00:00.000Z
2004-05-11T21:47:37.359Z

HTTP/1.0 500 Internal Server Error
Server: sfdc
Server: sfdc
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 21:47:47 GMT

soapenv:Server
INVALID_REPLICATION_DATE: startDate cannot be more than 30 days ago


INVALID_REPLICATION_DATE
startDate cannot be more than 30 days ago