SOAP client in NET - references or examples

Question

Background   I am creating a webservices site which will provide many types of simple services over SOAP and possibly other protocols too  The goal is to make it easy to do for example conversions  RSS parsing  spam checks and many other types of work  The site will be targeted mostly at beginner developers   My Problem   I have never developed any C   or  NET for that matter  I did hack some VB6 many years ago but that s it  Now I need some examples of doing RPC calls over SOAP in C   I have tried to search the web  and Stack Overflow  to find this but didn t find many resources  and I have no idea how to rank the resources  which are old  which are incorrect  etc    I have created a simple example service  which is called like this in PHP    lt  php  client   new SoapClient  http   webservi se year      URL to the WSDL echo  client- gt getCurrentYear      This method returns an integer  called  year    gt    I now want to call this method as easily as possible in C   All references and examples are very welcome  Where do I begin  Which classes modules whatever can I utilize   The solution does not have to involve SOAP at all if there are better communication frameworks  the back end is meant to be extensible   but note that the server side is implemented in PHP on Unix so proprietary solutions from Microsoft are out of the question on the server side   Note that I need this so I can write documentation possible for J  Random Web Developer to follow  even if they are on shared web hosting   I therefore think the best approach should be to do this in code only  but even other ways of doing this are of course welcome

User · Answer

I have done quite a bit of what you re talking about  and SOAP interoperability between platforms has one cardinal rule  CONTRACT FIRST   Do not derive your WSDL from code and then try to generate a client on a different platform   Anything more than  Hello World  type functions will very likely fail to generate code  fail to talk at runtime or  my favorite  fail to properly send or receive all of the data without raising an error   That said  WSDL is complicated  nasty stuff and I avoid writing it from scratch whenever possible   Here are some guidelines for reliable interop of services  using Web References  WCF  Axis2 Java  WS02  Ruby  Python  whatever     Go ahead and do code-first to create your initial WSDL   Then  delete your code and re-generate the server class es  from the WSDL   Almost every platform has a tool for this   This will show you what odd habits your particular platform has  and you can begin tweaking the WSDL to be simpler and more straightforward   Tweak  re-gen  repeat   You ll learn a lot this way  and it s portable knowledge  Stick to plain old language classes  POCO  POJO  etc   for complex types   Do NOT use platform-specific constructs like List lt   or DataTable   Even PHP associative arrays will appear to work but fail in ways that are difficult to debug across platforms  Stick to basic data types  bool  int  float  string  date Time   and arrays   Odds are  the more particular you get about a data type  the less agile you ll be to new requirements over time   You do NOT want to change your WSDL if you can avoid it  One exception to the data types above - give yourself a NameValuePair mechanism of some kind   You wouldn t believe how many times a list of these things will save your bacon in terms of flexibility  Set a real namespace for your WSDL   It s not hard  but you might not believe how many web services I ve seen in namespace  http   www tempuri org    Also  use a URN   urn com-myweb-servicename-v1   not a URL-based namespace   http   servicename myweb com v1    It s not a website  it s an abstract set of characters that defines a logical grouping   I ve probably had a dozen people call me for support and say they went to the  website  and it didn t work     lt  rant gt

User · Answer

Take a look at  using WCF Services with PHP   It explains the basics of what you need   As a theory summary   WCF or Windows Communication Foundation is a technology that allow to define services abstracted from the way - the underlying communication method - they ll be invoked   The idea is that you define a contract about what the service does and what the service offers and also define another contract about which communication method is used to actually consume the service  be it TCP  HTTP or SOAP   You have the first part of the article here  explaining how to create a very basic WCF Service   More resources   Using WCF with PHP5   Aslo take a look to NuSOAP  If you now NuSphere this is a toolkit to let you connect from PHP to an WCF service

User · Answer

You re looking in the wrong place  You should look up Windows Communication Framework     WCF is used both on the client and on the server

User · Answer

Here you can find a nice tutorial for calling a NuSOAP-based web-service from a  NET client application  But IMO  you should also consider the WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP  WSO2 WSF PHP  for servicing  See WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP 2 0 Significantly Enhances Industry   s Only PHP Library for Creating Both SOAP and REST Services  There is also a webminar about it   Now  in  NET world I also encourage the use of WCF  taking into account the interoperability issues  An interoperability example can be found here  but this example uses a PHP-client   WCF-service instead of the opposite  Feel free to implement the PHP-service  amp  WFC-client    There are some WCF s related open source projects on codeplex com that I found very productive  These projects are very useful to design  amp  implement Win Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation applications  Smart Client  Web Client and Mobile Client  They can be used in combination with WCF to wisely call any kind of Web services    Generally speaking  the patterns  amp  practices team summarize good practices  amp  designs in various open source projects that dealing with the  NET platform  specially for the web  So I think it s a good starting point for any design decision related to  NET clients

User · Answer

If you can get it to run in a browser then something as simple as this would work  var webRequest   WebRequest Create   http   webservi se year getCurrentYear     using  var response   webRequest GetResponse          using  var rd   new StreamReader response GetResponseStream                   var soapResult   rd ReadToEnd

User · Answer

Prerequisites  You already have the service and published WSDL file  and you want to call your web service from C  client application   There are 2 main way of doing this   A  ASP NET services  which is old way of doing SOA B  WCF  as John suggested  which is the latest framework from MS and provides many protocols  including open and MS proprietary ones    Adding a service reference step by step  The simplest way is to generate proxy classes in C  application  this process is called adding service reference      Open your project  or create a new one  in visual studio Right click on the project  on the project and not the solution  in Solution Explorer and click Add Service Reference A dialog should appear shown in screenshot below  Enter the url of your wsdl file and hit Ok  Note that if you ll receive error message after hitting ok  try removing  wsdl part from url     I m using http   www dneonline com calculator asmx WSDL as an example Expand Service References in Solution Explorer and double click CalculatorServiceReference  or whatever you named the named the service in the previous step    You should see generated proxy class name and namespace    In my case  the namespace is SoapClient CalculatorServiceReference  the name of proxy class is CalculatorSoapClient  As I said above  class names may vary in your case    Go to your C  source code and add the following   using WindowsFormsApplication1 ServiceReference1  Now you can call the service this way    Service1Client service   new Service1Client    int year   service getCurrentYear       Hope this helps  If you encounter any problems  let us know

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