Question

I am trying to interact with a .NET web service through PHP. I’m able to connect to the service, I’m able to call getFunctions and it returns a list of all the service functions. I have used soapUI to test out the web service, and all the requests work flawlessly when I use soapUI.

However, whenever I use PHP to call one of the service functions, I get a seemingly empty response.

Code:

$client = new SoapClient("http://soapservice.com/soap.asmx?WSDL");

$params = array();

$params["userName"] = 'myUserName';     
$params["password"] = 'somePass1234';   

$locations = $client->GetStuff($params);

var_dump($locations);

$locations = $client->GetStuff($params)->GetStuffResult;    

var_dump($locations);

The output of the var dumps is as follows:

object(stdClass)#35 (1) {
  ["GetStuffResult"]=>
  string(835807) ""
}
string(835807) ""

The first question I have is… how can an “empty” string be 835807 chars long? My second and more obvious question is where is the data and why can’t I access it? soapUI shows that the response is in XML, but I am seeing absolutely nothing of use in this response string. Please help!

Answer 1

If $location contains XML then chances are the output is correct but won’t be “shown” in your browser (unless a content-type header like text/plain is sent) because your browser doesn’t show (what it thinks to be) tags/elements. You need to encode the “XML string” in $location containing, for example, <foo> to <foo>. Try:

echo htmlentities(print_r($locations, true));

…or:

header("Content-Type: text/plain");
var_dump($locations);

…or just “view source” in your browser.