SOAP request with attribute

Question

I can not seem to find out how to set an attribute to a SOAP request without using the XSD_ANYXML encoding.

The request parameter should look as follows

<request
    xmlns:ns="/some/ns">
    ...
        <ns:parameter attr="some attribute">
            value
        </ns:parameter>
    ...
</request>

Of course the following code works, but it's rather ugly (ugly, because it uses string concatenation where it should use the SOAP_Client API and because it does not use the general namespace)

$param = new SoapVar(
    '<ns_xxx:parameter xmlns:ns_xxx="/some/ns" attr="some attribute">
        value
     </ns_xxx:parameter>',
    XSD_ANYXML
);

Is there a better way to create a SOAP request parameter with a namespace and an attribute?

I am looking for s.th. like the following (this is just some pseudo code using the SoapVar API):

$param = new SoapVar(
    array(
        '_' => 'value',
        'attr' => 'some attribute'
    ), 
    SOME_ENCODING,
    null,
    null,
    null,
    '/some/ns'
);

Answer 1

For this, you need to derived the class from SoapClient and Override the method __doRequest():

class ABRSoapClient extends SoapClient {

    // return xml request
    function __doRequest($request, $location, $action, $version) {
        $dom = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
        $dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
        $xml= $dom->loadXML($request);
        // Goto request Node and Set the attribute
        $attr_ns = $dom->createAttributeNS('xmlns:ns', '' ); // instead of xmlns:ns use Namespace URL
        $attr_ns->value = '/some/ns';
        // add atribute in businessReport node 
        $dom->getElementsByTagName($report_type)->item(0)->appendChild( $attr_ns );   
        $request = $dom->saveXML();
        return parent::__doRequest($request, $location, $action, $version);
    }
}

$client = new ABRSoapClient(.....);
$save_result = $client->request($param);

// You can check the form request using function
$client->__getLastRequest();

I hope this will resolve your problem.

Answer 2

SOAP does not support attributes, may be you should use REST instead!

EDIT: Please check the body style w3c:"4.3 SOAP Body" and remember that you need to encode your message with "soap-envelope" namespace and describe your XML types thats why, you can't use attributes to describe your message data.

But if you ask me, it can be made possible! You can use a custom SoapClient parser or something like that and convert your message as you like it. A example of that may be RSS over SOAP http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soaprdf. But, the problem would be that you would miss the descriptive information about your message data/types and other clients could not easy understand your messages!

My best practice for you would be to use elements instead of attributes, i know you need to fix your XML schema but thats the way it goes or switch to a other technology.

Answer 3

SOAP 1 does support attributes. Here is an example of Perl code using both attributes and values (from a client):

$som = $client->call(
    'tran:getContent',
    SOAP::Header->name('cred:credentials')->attr({
        'username' => $username,
        'password' => 'xxx',
        'customerID' => 'xxx'}
    ),
    SOAP::Data->name('contentID')->value('9999')
)