Handling Soap timeouts in PHP

Question

I'm working on a project where I am verifying information from a user with a SOAP web service. I currently am taking care of errors assuming that I'm receiving responses from the web service, but also need to handle the edge cases of a service timeout or unavailability.

In the case of a timeout or service unavailability, I need to pretend that the request was successful (that the web service approved the info), but I'm not clear on what exceptions are thrown.

Some pseudo-code:

// $client is PHP's SoapClient class
try {
  $response = $client->SomeSoapRequest();
}
catch(SoapFault $e){
  // handle issues returned by the web service
}
catch(Exception $e){
  // handle PHP issues with the request
}

What I can't seem to find is:

1. Are timeouts a SoapFault? If so, what is the best way to distinguish between a timeout error and web service issues (like a type error, etc.)? I found one page that mentioned an error where the message was something to the effect of "Error loading headers", but didn't mention if this was a Soap fault.
2. How is a service unavailability potentially going to happen? A PHP exception seems like it would make sense (a SoapFault would be returned from the web service where unavailability would be a socket issue or similar)?
3. Is there an existing service (e.g. example) that I can test a timeout against? Most timeout related discussions seem to be related to preventing timeouts by extending the default timeout setting, which isn't ideal in this situation.

Thanks!

Answer 1

To deal with timeouts in the service

$client = new SoapClient($wsdl, array("connection_timeout"=>10));

// SET SOCKET TIMEOUT if(defined('RESPONSE_TIMEOUT') && RESPONSE_TIMEOUT != '') { ini_set('default_socket_timeout', RESPONSE_TIMEOUT); }

Answer 2

The best way to fix this, if you're comfortable with using CURL, is to extend the SoapClient class and override the __doRequest() function. I've got a post on my blog where I explain what I did to resolve this issue:

http://www.darqbyte.com/2009/10/21/timing-out-php-soap-calls/

Answer 3

Looks like default_socket_timeout is not taken into account when making SOAP calls over HTTPS: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=48524. Bug open at the time of writing. As a comment on the blog post Robert Ludwick references above points out, the workaround the post discusses works around this bug also.