It is indeed possible.
Here is an example calling the Weather SOAP Service using plain requests lib:
import requests
url="http://wsf.cdyne.com/WeatherWS/Weather.asmx?WSDL"
#headers = {'content-type': 'application/soap+xml'}
headers = {'content-type': 'text/xml'}
body = """<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:ns0="http://ws.cdyne.com/WeatherWS/" xmlns:ns1="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
<SOAP-ENV:Header/>
<ns1:Body><ns0:GetWeatherInformation/></ns1:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>"""
response = requests.post(url,data=body,headers=headers)
print response.content
Some notes:
application/soap+xml is probably the more correct header to use (but the weatherservice prefers text/xmlFor example:
from jinja2 import Environment, PackageLoader
env = Environment(loader=PackageLoader('myapp', 'templates'))
template = env.get_template('soaprequests/WeatherSericeRequest.xml')
body = template.render()
Some people have mentioned the suds library. Suds is probably the more correct way to be interacting with SOAP, but I often find that it panics a little when you have WDSLs that are badly formed (which, TBH, is more likely than not when you're dealing with an institution that still uses SOAP ;) ).
You can do the above with suds like so:
from suds.client import Client
url="http://wsf.cdyne.com/WeatherWS/Weather.asmx?WSDL"
client = Client(url)
print client ## shows the details of this service
result = client.service.GetWeatherInformation()
print result
Note: when using suds, you will almost always end up needing to use the doctor!
Finally, a little bonus for debugging SOAP; TCPdump is your friend. On Mac, you can run TCPdump like so:
sudo tcpdump -As 0
This can be helpful for inspecting the requests that actually go over the wire.
The above two code snippets are also available as gists: