Dumping SOAP Request and Response

SOAP Web Service Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Dumping SOAP Request and Response

This section provides a tutorial example of how to dump the actual SOAP request and response message after calling a WSDL operation in RPC style.

When you call a WSDL operation in the RPC style as presented in the last two tutorials, the PHP SOAP extension is actually converting the RPC function calls into a SOAP request. After receiving the SOAP response, it will convert the response body back to a result object.

In the example below, I turned on "trace" option, and called __getLastRequestHeaders(), __getLastRequest(), __getLastResponseHeaders(), and __getLastResponse() to retrieve the actual SOAP request and response messages.

<?php 
# NumberConversionDump.php
# Copyright (c) 2007 HerongYang.com. All Rights Reserved.
#
   $client = new SoapClient
("https://www.dataaccess.com/webservicesserver/numberconversion.wso?WSDL", 
      array('trace' => 1));

   $operation = "NumberToWords";
   $inputs = array('ubiNum'=>202);
   $args = array($inputs);
   $result = $client->__soapCall($operation, $args);

   echo("Operation: $operation\n");
   echo("Arguments:\n");
   var_dump($args);
   echo("Result:\n");
   var_dump($result);

   echo("\nRequest headers:\n".$client->__getLastRequestHeaders());
   echo("\nRequest:\n".$client->__getLastRequest());
   echo("\nResponse headers:\n".$client->__getLastResponseHeaders());
   echo("\nResponse:\n".$client->__getLastResponse());
?>

When running it, I am getting:

herong> php NumberConversionDump.php

Operation: NumberToWords
Arguments:
array(1) {
  [0]=>
  array(1) {
 ["ubiNum"]=>
 int(202)
  }
}
Result:
object(stdClass)#2 (1) {
  ["NumberToWordsResult"]=>
  string(20) "two hundred and two "
}

Request headers:
POST /webservicesserver/numberconversion.wso HTTP/1.1
Host: www.dataaccess.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: PHP-SOAP/7.0.2
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
SOAPAction: ""
Content-Length: 293


Request:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope
 xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
 xmlns:ns1="http://www.dataaccess.com/webservicesserver/">
 <SOAP-ENV:Body>
  <ns1:NumberToWords>
   <ns1:ubiNum>202</ns1:ubiNum>
  </ns1:NumberToWords>
 </SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

Response headers:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Length: 352
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
Server: Microsoft-IIS/8.0
Web-Service: DataFlex 18.1
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000

Response:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
 <soap:Body>
  <m:NumberToWordsResponse
   xmlns:m="http://www.dataaccess.com/webservicesserver/">
   <m:NumberToWordsResult>two hundred and two </m:NumberToWordsResult>
  </m:NumberToWordsResponse>
 </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

With the SOAP request and response messages printed out, we can figure out the following rules used by SoapClient the RPC calls:

The default SOAP version is SOAP 1.1 which is identified by the "soap" namespace of http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/.
The default transportation protocol is HTTP/1.1. See the request header lines.
When the RPC call is invoked, input parameters will be mapped to child elements of the SOAP request element, "NumberToWords" in the above example.
When the RPC call is returned, properties of the returning object has will be mapped to child elements of the SOAP response element, "NumberToWordsResponse" in the above example.