SOAP request with attribute

Question

hi all,

I can not seem to find out how to set an attribute to a SOAP request without using the XSD_ANYXML encoding.

The request parameter should look as follows

<request
    xmlns:ns="/some/ns">
    ...
        <ns:parameter attr="some attribute">
            value
        </ns:parameter>
    ...
</request>

Of course the following code works, but it's rather ugly (ugly, because it uses string concatenation where it should use the SOAP_Client API and because it does not use the general namespace)

$param = new SoapVar(
    '<ns_xxx:parameter xmlns:ns_xxx="/some/ns" attr="some attribute">
        value
     </ns_xxx:parameter>',
    XSD_ANYXML
);

Is there a better way to create a SOAP request parameter with a namespace and an attribute?

I am looking for s.th. like the following (this is just some pseudo code using the SoapVar API):

$param = new SoapVar(
    array(
        '_' => 'value',
        'attr' => 'some attribute'
    ), 
    SOME_ENCODING,
    null,
    null,
    null,
    '/some/ns'
);

Answer 1

SOAP does not support attributes, may be you should use REST instead!

EDIT: Please check the body style w3c:"4.3 SOAP Body" and remember that you need to encode your message with "soap-envelope" namespace and describe your XML types thats why, you can't use attributes to describe your message data.

But if you ask me, it can be made possible! You can use a custom SoapClient parser or something like that and convert your message as you like it. A example of that may be RSS over SOAP http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soaprdf. But, the problem would be that you would miss the descriptive information about your message data/types and other clients could not easy understand your messages!

My best practice for you would be to use elements instead of attributes, i know you need to fix your XML schema but thats the way it goes or switch to a other technology.