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Answer 1

A:

I'd say there's a dubious benefit from static generation of the classes wrapping a SOAP service in a dynamic language like PHP. What I usually do is just hand-crafting the SOAP HTTP request and then feeding the results to SimpleXMLElement, like:

$Response = new SimpleXMLElement($soap_response_xml);
echo strval($Response->ElementA->ElementB['AttributeC']);

Which corresponds to SOAP response XML:

<Response>
    <ElementA>
        <ElementB AttributeC="foo"/>
    </ElementA>
</Response>

and outputs "foo".

This way has no WSDL parsing overhead. But if you do want to deal with WSDL, and avoid hand-crafting the HTTP request, check this out.

In either way, it's better to "generate the classes" at runtime, because your language allows that.

Ivan Krechetov 2009-11-12 07:33:21

Sample of hand-made SOAP request$full_response = @http_post_data( 'http://example.com/ws.asmx', $REQUEST_BODY, array( 'headers' => array( 'Content-Type' => 'text/xml; charset=UTF-8', 'SOAPAction' => 'HotelAvail', ), 'timeout' => 60, ), $request_info);$response_xml = new SimpleXMLElement(strstr($full_response, '<?xml'));

Ivan Krechetov 2009-11-12 07:38:26

I'm wondering how well this method will scale (in terms of programming effort) with non-trivial SOAP objects. I'm writing a SOAP client in PHP right now, for example, for a service that has 12 classes with several layers of nesting and multiple inter-class relationships. Does any of that complexity matter for this approach?

Ben Dunlap 2009-11-12 08:32:48

We work with even more complex XML of dozens of MB in size. It doesn't matter. You'd call those attributes by name against static classes anyway. AND you save _a lot_ by ignoring WSDL.

Ivan Krechetov 2009-11-12 08:55:05

Answer 2

+1 A:

According to this Question & Answer, you can use the generateProxyCode() method of the PEAR SOAP_WSDL class.

Henrik Opel 2009-11-12 07:48:35

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