I am currently working on a project which I think using soap as part of it would be a good idea but I can’t find how it will work in the way that I need.
I have a C# Console Application called ConsoleApp, ConsoleApp will also have a PHP web interface. What I’m thinking of doing, is the PHP web interface controls the ConsoleApp in some way, so I click a button on the web interface, then this does a sends a soap request to a soap service and then the soap service, sends the information on to the consoleApp, and the result is returned back to the SoapService and then returned back to PHP.
This seems like it would need to separate soap services, one for php to interface with and one within the ConsoleApp but this doesn’t sound right, I think I might be misunderstanding the purpose of Soap.
How can this be achieved. Thanks for any help you can provide
UPDATE
As requested I thought I’d add a bit more information on what I am trying to achieve.
In the console app, it is acting as an email server sending out emails that are given to the program and then being sent on, and if it can’t send it retries a couple of times until the email goes into a failed state.
The web interface will provide a status of what the email server is doing, i.e. how many emails are incoming, how many are yet to be processed, how many have sent and how many have failed.
From the web page you will be able to shutdown or restart the email server or put one of the failed emails back into the the queue to be processed.
The idea is, when the user adds a failed email back into the queue it sends a soap message that the console app will receive, add the information back into the queue, log the event in the console apps log file, increment a counter which is how it keep track of emails that need to be processed. Once this has been done it should then send a response back to the web interface to say whether or not the email was successfully added back into the queue or whether it failed for some reason.
I don’t really want to keep on polling the database every so many seconds as there could be the potential for their to be a large number of emails that will be being processed so polling the database would put a large load on the MySQL server which I don’t want, which is why I thought soap as the email server would only need to do something when it receives a soap request to do something.
Thanks for any help.
Every web service is going to need a client (in your case PHP) and a server (ConsoleApp). Even though there are two endpoints, it is still one web service. Your PHP will send a SOAP request which ConsoleApp will receive, process and respond to with a SOAP response.
So when someone clicks the button on the web page, you can use JavaScript to build and send the SOAP envelope in the browser. The alternative is to POST the values to a PHP page that will build and send the SOAP.
I have to admit though, your scenario sounds a unusual. I personally haven’t heard of web pages talking directly with console apps. Web pages usually talk to web servers, and the servers are usually the ones issuing atypical requests, like your request to ConsoleApp. While it is technically possible, but I think it is going to be harder then you are expecting.
Personally, I would ditch SOAP in favor of a much more simple and scalable solution. Assuming you have access to a database, I would have the PHP create a record in the database when the user clicks the button. ConsoleApp would then poll the database every X seconds to look for new records. When it finds a new record, it processes it.
This has the benefit of being simple (database access is almost always easier than SOAP) and scalable (you could easily run an arbitrary number of ConsoleApps to process all of the incoming requests if you are expecting heavy loads). Also, neither the PHP page nor the ConsoleApp have a direct dependency on the other so each individual component is less likely to cause a failure in the whole system.