Question

I’m a complete noob in XML and SOAP,

Could you give some advice on at least where to start, or some example?

(I’m not begging to write code for me)

Here are the specs:

I just expect to receive two double values. What is an easiest way to do it?

POST /CurrencyConvertor.asmx HTTP/1.1
Host: www.webservicex.net
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: length

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap12:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap12="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
  <soap12:Body>
    <ConversionRate xmlns="http://www.webserviceX.NET/">
      <FromCurrency>PHP</FromCurrency>
      <ToCurrency>USD or EUR</ToCurrency>
    </ConversionRate>
  </soap12:Body>
</soap12:Envelope>

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: length

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap12:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap12="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
  <soap12:Body>
    <ConversionRateResponse xmlns="http://www.webserviceX.NET/">
      <ConversionRateResult>double</ConversionRateResult>
    </ConversionRateResponse>
  </soap12:Body>
</soap12:Envelope>

The above specs’s origin: http://www.webservicex.net/CurrencyConvertor.asmx?op=ConversionRate

The first block is supposed to be a request, and the other response…

EDIT

Alright, I stopped at a standard PHP class, but I don’t quite understand what is being asked for in this __doRequest method:

$client = new SoapClient();
$client->__doRequest ( <<<EOD
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap12:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap12="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
  <soap12:Body>
    <ConversionRate xmlns="http://www.webserviceX.NET/">
      <FromCurrency>PHP</FromCurrency>
      <ToCurrency>USD or EUR</ToCurrency>
    </ConversionRate>
  </soap12:Body>
</soap12:Envelope>
EOD
, "http://www.webservicex.net/CurrencyConvertor.asmx" , $???, $???  );

http://www.php.net/manual/en/soapclient.dorequest.php

What is action, and what should I put as version, I know – a soap version 1.2 but the parameter is int so it cannot be assigned a 1.2 value lol…

EDIT2:

Alright, this is what I’ve got so far, but it gets me an empty string…

$client = new SoapClient(null, array('location'=>'http://www.webservicex.net/CurrencyConvertor.asmx','uri'=>''));
$client->__doRequest ( <<<EOD
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap12:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap12="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
  <soap12:Body>
    <ConversionRate xmlns="http://www.webserviceX.NET/">
      <FromCurrency>PHP</FromCurrency>
      <ToCurrency>USD or EUR</ToCurrency>
    </ConversionRate>
  </soap12:Body>
</soap12:Envelope>
EOD
, "http://www.webservicex.net/CurrencyConvertor.asmx" , "ConversionRate", 2  );

echo "Response :<br>", htmlentities($client->__getLastResponse());

…I just dont get this ‘uri’ thing – beyond my understanding. It makes me want to hit my head to the wall.

Answer 1

Basically what you need are two parts.

1. A SOAPClient class, which solves the communication, knows about the server URL, sends requests and receives responses (which you got in XML in your question) and also triggers #2, which is:

2. The second part is an XML parser / marshaller, which can convert a request objects (containing fromCurrency and toCurrency) to a correct XML string the server can understand (according to the WSDL) and convert some XML into a response object again using the WSDL. This part is a bit tricky, but I found a lot of documentation for that, search for “SOAP PHP” and you get some examples). These two processes are called marshalling and unmarshalling (to help you find something quicker with Google). Your StockQuote webservice doesn’t really provide a WSDL, which is basically a description of all possible operations (in your case just one: GetQuote) and its available objects (in your case only simple types string, which don’t have to be defined, since they are WSDL standard)

I haven’t done SOAP with PHP, but spent a lot of time with Java+SOAP and can understand how difficult it is. In theory you just send some XML to the server and get some XML back. But the XML sent has to be in the correct format and when you receive a response, you want to convert the response into an object and not deal with some XML string.

For a simple web service like this, you might consider constructing the XML request by hand (simply putting together the XML string) and substr the response to find the requested answer.