phaq

So you finally hacked up your nifty SOAP::Lite web service only to find that it works fine with SOAP::Lite or PHP clients, but ASP.NET terribily fails?
Yes, I should mention, that you must of course write up a WSDL first, especially for .NET, I’ll cover that topic in a follow-up.

This post however refers to a hack that I have done to SOAP::Lite to allow for dynamic response rewriting for different SOAP client implementations.

So, without loosing to many words, you’ll find a code sample down below.
This sample script is intended to be run through the CGI of your favorite webserver, let’s say it’s URL would be something like http://webservice.acme.nowhere/webservice.cgi.

So, here’s the code, which I have hopefully documented well enough, otherwise feel free to ask 😉

#!/usr/bin/perl -w


# package MySoapHandler
#
# here we have a self-contained package within the script which we need
# to override the SOAP::Transport::HTTP built-in functions.
#
# this is required to add some compatibility support for SOAP clients
# that don't get along well with SOAP::Lite's native representation
# of the XML response object.
# An example to this is ASP.NET
# 
package MySoapHandler;

use SOAP::Transport::HTTP;
use Data::Dumper;

use vars qw(@ISA);
@ISA = qw(SOAP::Transport::HTTP::CGI);


# sub make_response
#
# override SOAP::Transport::HTTP::make_response,
# in here we basically apply some rewritings to
# the XML output before sending it to the client
# we check on the HTTP_USER_AGENT to do this dynamically
#
sub make_response { 
	my $self = shift;                       # get the class name
	my $self_funcname = (caller(0))[3];     # get the function name
	printf STDERR sprintf( "%s: Call to %s/%s(%s): dispatch started ...\n", POSIX::strftime("%m-%d-%Y %H:%M:%S", localtime), $self, $self_funcname, join(',', @_) );

	my($code, $response) = @_;


	# check the HTTP USER AGENT first
	# since we want to stay compatible to SOAP::Lite and PHP clients,
        # we apply our special output handling stuff to all other clients
        #
        # you may, of course, also switch this around and apply this
        # strictly to the ASP.NET user agent
	#
	if( $ENV{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !~ /SOAP::Lite/ && $ENV{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !~ /PHP/ ) {
		printf STDERR sprintf ("USER_AGENT is '%s', applying rewriting to XML stream.\n", $ENV{HTTP_USER_AGENT});

                # in here, you may now apply all sorts of regexp magic
                # to perform your rewriting on the '$response' variable content,
                # let's say, you want to reply your Method Response XML entity,
                # you'd do so like this:
		#
		$response =~ s|<([a-zA-Z0-9]+)Response xmlns="http://[a-zA-Z0-9\.\/]+">||g;
		$response =~ s|||g;


		# be verbose on what we've done
		#
		printf STDERR sprintf( "XML stream after rewriting:\n%s\n", $response );

	} else {
		printf STDERR sprintf ("USER_AGENT is '%s', no rewriting of the XML stream is needed.\n", $ENV{HTTP_USER_AGENT});		
	}


	printf STDERR sprintf( "%s: Call to %s/%s: dispatch completed.\n", POSIX::strftime("%m-%d-%Y %H:%M:%S", localtime), $self, $self_funcname );

        # return the response by invoking the parent package's native function
        #
	my $result = $self->SUPER::make_response($code, $response);
} 

1;
# end: package MySoapHandler #



# normally, we would dispatch calls like this:
#
# SOAP::Transport::HTTP::CGI->dispatch_to('/path/to/my/lib/dir', 'my::service')->handle;
#
# since we override the base class with our own,
# we use the object provided by our self-contained package above,
# so, basically, it's the same ;-)
#
MySoapHandler
	-> dispatch_to('/path/to/my/lib/dir', 'my::service')
	-> handle;

exit;
__END__

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