PHP SOAP client that understands multi-part messages?

Question

Is there such a beastie? The simple SOAP client that ships with PHP does not understand multi-part messages. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The native PHP SoapClient class does not support multipart messages (and is strongly limited in all WS-* matters) and I also I think that neither the PHP written libraries NuSOAP nor Zend_Soap can deal with this sort of SOAP messages.

I can think of two solutions:

• extend the SoapClient class and overwrite the SoapClient::__doRequest() method to get hold of the actual response string which you can then parse at your whim.

  class MySoapClient extends SoapClient
  {
      public function __doRequest($request, $location, $action, $version, $one_way = 0)
      {
          $response = parent::__doRequest($request, $location, $action, $version, $one_way);
          // parse $response, extract the multipart messages and so on
      }
  }
  

  This could be somewhat tricky though - but worth a try.

• use a more sophisticated SOAP client library for PHP. The first and only one that comes into my mind is WSO2 WSF/PHP which features SOAP MTOM, WS-Addressing, WS-Security, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Secure Conversation and WS-ReliableMessaging at the cost of having to install a native PHP extension.

Answer 2

Using S. Gehrig second idea worked just fine here.

In most cases, you have just a single message packed into a MIME MultiPart message. In those cases a "SoapFault exception: [Client] looks like we got no XML document" exception is thrown. Here the following class should do just fine:

class MySoapClient extends SoapClient
{
    public function __doRequest($request, $location, $action, $version, $one_way = 0)
    {
        $response = parent::__doRequest($request, $location, $action, $version, $one_way);
        // strip away everything but the xml.
        $response = preg_replace('#^.*(<\?xml.*>)[^>]*$#s', '$1', $response);
        return $response;
    }
}