My recommendation is to avoid them completely and download SoapUI (which is written in Java). This desktop software will allow you to create a new project using the WSDL (file or URL) and view and manually create requests against a service. You can see the raw data exchange (HINT: There can be additional required HTTP headers you need to pass. SOAPAction is one that is almost ALWAYS used) and then using whatever language you want create a web client that POSTs the XML (templated so you can change various parameters) and then parse the resulting XML response to get the data you want. Every programming language has a decent XML parser so that shouldn't be a problem (although sometimes you have "massage" the resulting XML).
Here is a simple example of a client in PHP:
$soap_url = "https://blahblah.com:1234/Service";
$soap_act = '"/SomeCall"'; // Use SoapUI raw view of request to find this
$soap_xml = <<<ENDOFFILE
<soapenv .......... </soapenv ...............
ENDOFFILE;
$resp = \Httpful\Request::post($soap_url)
->body($soap_xml)
->sends('text/xml')
->addHeader('SOAPAction', $soap_act)
->timeoutIn(10)
->send();
// There are ways to make the PHP XML parser handle namespaces but usually
// we don't need them so make them simple XML elements instead
// (eg. s_Envelope)
$xml_str = str_replace('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>', '',
$resp->body);
$resp->body);
$xml_str = preg_replace("/(<\/?)(\w+):([^>]*>)/", "$1$2_$3", $xml_str);
$xml_str = preg_replace("/ \w+(:\w+)?=\"[^\"]*\"/", "", $xml_str);
$xml = new \SimpleXMLElement($xml_str);
$body = $xml->xpath('//s_Envelope'); // Can use this to narrow it down
$array = json_decode(json_encode((array)$body), TRUE);
// Now you can access the data using $array['key_name'][1] etc.. etc..
print_r($array);
Good luck and hopefully this will save you some time! :)
// Now you can access the data using $array['key_name'][1] etc.. etc..
print_r($array);
Good luck and hopefully this will save you some time! :)
