Question

I am currently working on a system in Microsoft Access 2007, and I need to make a SOAP request to an outside webserver in order to retrieve some data. I’m new to both SOAP and Visual Basic, and I’ve been having trouble figuring out exactly what I need to do to make this SOAP request happen.

From some Googling about, it seems that previous versions of Access may have needed Microsoft’s SOAP Toolkit in order to make a SOAP request. So far as I can tell, however, the SOAP Toolkit was deprecated several years ago, so I’m pretty sure that’s not what I want. Do I need to download an outside library to make a SOAP call? If so, which? If not, what is the VB syntax used for making a SOAP call from an Access 2007 file?

Answer 1

I don’t know if there is a better way than doing it through VBA using a low-level Http POST to pass the SOAP message to the server. You will have to craft the XML SOAP message by whatever method you choose. Here is a sample function to do an Http POST in VBA.

Function doHttpPost(request As String) As String

    Dim response As String
    Dim http As WinHttp.WinHttpRequest
    Set http = New WinHttp.WinHttpRequest

    On Error GoTo doPostError

    http.setTimeouts 30000, 30000, 30000, 300000

    http.Open "POST", "http://someserver.com/soapListener", False
    http.setRequestHeader "name", "value" 'set any headers you want'

    http.send request

    If http.Status <> 200 Then
        MsgBox "An error has occurred with your request. " & vbCrLf & "The error message is: " & http.responseText & vbCrLf & http.Status & " " & http.statusText
        Exit Function
    End If

    doHttpPost = http.responseText
    Exit Function

doPostError:
    'process error messages here'

End Function