I looked around a lot before posting this question so my apologies if it is on another post and this is only my second quesiton on here so apologies if I don\'t format this
You have empty $_POST. If your web-server wants see data in json-format you need to read the raw input and then parse it with JSON decode.
You need something like that:
$json = file_get_contents('php://input');
$obj = json_decode($json);
Also you have wrong code for testing JSON-communication...
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS tells curl to encode your parameters as application/x-www-form-urlencoded. You need JSON-string here.
UPDATE
Your php code for test page should be like that:
$data_string = json_encode($data);
$ch = curl_init('http://webservice.local/');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data_string);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
'Content-Type: application/json',
'Content-Length: ' . strlen($data_string))
);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
$result = json_decode($result);
var_dump($result);
Also on your web-service page you should remove one of the lines header('Content-type: application/json');. It must be called only once.