I thought Zend_Soap was going to be easy

Jan 13: I thought Zend_Soap was going to be easy

But then I tried to use it. I had a project that I needed to respond to SOAP requests and considering the issues I had last time I played with SOAP, I thought I'd try it a different way this time. The Zend framework is always described as being a collection of components that you can wire together in order to get work done. Most of the time, you use it to build a full MVC stack application, but I only needed one component (I thought) in order to get my work done.

Turns out you need a whole bunch of junk in order to be able to use the Zend_Soap component without a full copy of the Zend Framework:

Zend_Exception - I always thought this was a dumb thing in the first place. I use the SPL exceptions for my stuff.
Zend_Loader - What? Why? I required my class and most of the ZF uses requires as well so I am not sure why it wanted the loader
Zend_Registry - I thought maybe to cache the wsdl? But that's cached in /tmp by the underlying PHP soap action
Zend_Uri - Makes sense, the service is a web service after all
Zend_Validate - Have to make sure the Uri is valid I guess
Zend_Soap - duh

In the end, I needed 106 source files in 20 folders to get things done. This is especially crazy when you think that you can get a boiler plate client working by doing this:So you may be asking yourself if the Zend_Soap really needs all of those files. I thought so as well, but to be honest, I am trying to use the component to get a quick start on the service, not to spend an annoyingly long time going through each component only pulling out the exact source files I needed and placing them in their proper place in my library folder. You may also be asking yourself why I would bother in the first place. I'll tell you why, dear reader, it's because I wanted automatic WSDL generation! And it's because of this small desire that my troubles began.

I wanted automatic wsdl generation because I am lazy and WSDL creation is tedious. Even in Zend Studio which has a pretty cool WSDL designer in it. Not to mention the fact that I am developing this junk and I want to add and remove API calls on a whim without having to face having to redo my WSDL again each time. I started out with a few small source files

/**
 * index.php - The service gateway
 */
require_once '../lib/MyService.php';

$wsdl = 'http://soap.localhost/wsdl.php';
$options = array();

$server = new Zend_Soap_Server($wsdl, $options);
$server->setClass('MyService');
$server->handle();

/**
 * wsdl.php - Automatic WSDL generation service
 */
require_once 'MyService.php';
require_once 'Zend/Soap/AutoDiscover.php';

$wsdl = 'http://soap.localhost/index.php';
$autodiscover = new Zend_Soap_AutoDiscover(true, $wsdl);
$autodiscover->setClass('MyService');
$autodiscover->handle();

/**
 * client.php - A test client to see if things are working
 */
require_once 'Zend/Soap/Client.php';

$wsdl = 'http://soap.localhost/wsdl.php;
$options = array();

$client = new Zend_Soap_Client($wsdl, $options);

try {
    $players = $client->getPlayersForTeam('jays');

echo "The following players play for that team:<br>";
    foreach ($players as $player) {
        echo $player,'<br>';
    }
} catch (SoapFault $fault) {
    echo "There was a problem with the request: {$fault->getMessage()}<br>";
    echo '<pre>',$fault->getTraceAsString(),'</pre>';
}

/**
 * MyService.php - The class that does the work for the gateway
 */
class MyService
{
    protected $players = array(
        'jays' => array(
            'name' => 'Blue Jays',
            'location' => 'Toronto, Canada',
            'players' => array(
                49 => 'Jeremy Accardo',
                57 => 'Shawn Camp'
            )
        ),
        'yankees' => array(
            'name' => 'Yankees',
            'location' => 'New York, New York',
            'players' => array(
                91 => 'Alfredo Aceves',
                63 => 'Jonathan Albaladejo'
            )
        )
    );

/**
     * Get player information based on the player id
     *
     * @param integer $playerId
     * @return string
     */
    public function getPlayer($playerId)
    {
        foreach ($this->players as $team => $details) {
            if (array_key_exists($playerId, $details['players'])) {
                return $details['players'][$playerId];
            }
        }

return false;
    }

/**
     * Get all players for a particular team
     *
     * @param string $teamId
     * @return array
     */
    public function getPlayersForTeam($teamId)
    {
        if (array_key_exists($teamId, $this->players)) {
            return $this->players[$teamId]['players'];
        }

return false;
    }
}

Everything should be pretty straight forward. When I hit client.php it grabs the WSDL file from wsdl.php and then uses that to make the call to index.php. The problem was that I was getting a version mismatch soap fault. After all of the screwing around to get Zend_Soap installed and configured I was pretty annoyed by the fact that the server and client from the same framework could not speak to each other out of the box. I dug around a bit and found this one bullet point in the documentation:

'http://' .$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] is used as an URI where the WSDL is available by default but can be overwritten via setUri() method. Looking at the API docs for Zend_Soap_AutoDiscover::setUri we see that we just pass in the new Uri and everything should work as expected. Except it didn't. I have no idea why exactly because I immediately decided to get rid of wsdl.php and simple use a get parameter on index.php to return the WSDL. My index now looks something like this:Now my client can talk to my server and everyone is happy.

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I thought Zend_Soap was going to be easy

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Jan 13: I thought Zend_Soap was going to be easy

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