SOAP for Dummies?

[Mark Wieder]

Scott Rossi <scott at ...> writes:

> 
> Hey All:
> 
> I'm looking to grab some weather data from a web service that apparently
> uses SOAP requests and responses, for which I know absolutely nothing,
> (other than it's XML?), and am looking for some more info.
> 
> I picked up Mark Wieder's SOAP lib stack, but I'm wondering if there's a
> resource/example somewhere that explains the process in simple terms (thus
> the "dummy" in the title).  I've found dozens of references on the web that
> talk about structure but I'm still unclear how to use the format with
> LiveCode.  Is this a "put url. . ." type of thing or is the request sent in
> some other manner?  Any examples around somewhere that I can look at?

It's unfortunately not as simple as a "put url" statement. Your best friend here
is the associated wsdl document. However, these are hierarchical xml documents
and aren't particularly user-readable. If you have a recent version of the
libSOAP library, use the WSDL.CreateServicePrototypeFromFile function to
generate the code you need to call the web service. The parameters are a path to
the wsdl file on your computer and the name of the service you want to call.

Then start using the library and just use the generated code. Calling a web
service is a complicated matter of creating an SOAP header and then an
associated SOAP envelope, both xml, posting those to the web server using an
xmlrpc call, getting the response from the service, and parsing it. The libSOAP
library tries its best to insulate you from having to know the intimate details
of what's going on there.

-- 
 Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net