Question

I have a problem passing a string argument using Perl. The following code

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use SOAP::Lite;
my $service = SOAP::Lite->service('http://localhost:8080/greeting?wsdl');
print $service->greetClient('perl wooooo'), "\n";

Results in

Greeting null! Have a nice day…

A similar python code

from suds.client import Client
client = Client('http://localhost:8080/greeting?wsdl')
print client.service.greetClient('python wooooo')

works perfectly

Greeting python wooooo! Have a nice day…

I tried to set different encodings

print $service->encoding('utf-8')->greetClient("perl wooooo"), "\n";

with the same result.

A SOAP Monitor shows that there is no arg0 in a case of Perl

<greetClient xsi:nil="true"  xsi:type="tns:greetClient" />

which is present in a case of Python

<ns0:greetClient>
  <arg0>python wooooo</arg0>
</ns0:greetClient>

What can be a problem?

Why it’s so complicated to implement a SOAP client with Perl compared to Python?

EDIT:
SOLUTION

Finally the following solution is working

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Compile::SOAP11;
use XML::Compile::WSDL11;
use XML::Compile::Transport::SOAPHTTP;

my $soap = XML::Compile::WSDL11->new('c:/temp/greeting.wsdl');
my $call = $soap->compileClient('greetClient');
print $call->(arg0 => 'perl wooooo'){'greetClientResponse'}{'return'}, "\n";

Answer 1

SOAP::Lite can be infuriatingly bad. You might give XML::Compile::SOAP a try:

use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Compile::SOAP11;
use XML::Compile::WSDL11;
use XML::Compile::Transport::SOAPHTTP;

my $soap = XML::Compile::WSDL11->new(
    'http://localhost:8080/greeting?wsdl',
    schema_dirs => [
        'c:/soft/Perl/site/lib/XML/Compile/SOAP11/xsd'
        'c:/soft/Perl/site/lib/XML/Compile/XOP/xsd'
        'c:/soft/Perl/site/lib/XML/Compile/xsd'
    ]
);
$soap->compileCalls;
my ( $response, $trace ) = $soap->call( 'greetClient', arg0 => 'perl wooooo' );
$trace->printResponse;

$response will be the call response converted to a hashref via XML::Simple, which may be all you need. The $trace object is handy to see what the raw XML response looks like.