SOAP Communication Example

<< Introduction to SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)

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This section describes an simple example of SOAP communication.

Before going into details of the SOAP specification, let's try a very simple SOAP example. There are 3 basic steps involved in a SOAP communication:

1. Creating a SOAP message. This is easy. Just use any text editor to enter the following SOAP message, hello.msg:

<env:Envelope xmlns:env="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
 <env:Header>
  <h:control xmlns:h="http://herong.com/header">
   <h:sender>Herong</h:sender>
  </h:control>
 </env:Header>
 <env:Body>
  <b:greeting xmlns:b="http://herong.com/body">
   <b:msg>Hello there!</b:msg>
  </b:greeting>
 </env:Body>
</env:Envelope>

2. Transmitting the message from a SOAP node, my machine, to another SOAP node, your machine. A simple way to do this is for me to send hello.msg to you as an email, so you will get something like this:

From: herong@my.com
To: you@your.com
Subject: Greeting

<env:Envelope xmlns:env="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
 <env:Header>
  <h:control xmlns:h="http://herong.com/header">
   <h:sender>Herong</h:sender>
  </h:control>
 </env:Header>
 <env:Body>
  <b:greeting xmlns:b="http://herong.com/body">
   <b:msg>Hello there!</b:msg>
  </b:greeting>
 </env:Body>
</env:Envelope>

3. Processing the message. Once you got my SOAP message, you should be able to read it, and do whatever you want to do with it.

Last update: 2007.

Sections in This Chapter

What Is SOAP?

SOAP Communication Example