Soap xml is passing reference in php - php

Question

I am calling a webservice using soap in php but I am getting the error in xml as response from the server.
The problem is that when creating the xml for the request Php introduces the id in the xml and then wherever it finds the same node it just passes the id as the reference.
Eg:-
<ns1:ChargeBU id=\"ref1\">
<ns1:ChargeBreakUp>
<ns1:PriceId>0</ns1:PriceId>
<ns1:ChargeType>TboMarkup</ns1:ChargeType>
<ns1:Amount>35</ns1:Amount>
</ns1:ChargeBreakUp><ns1:ChargeBreakUp>
<ns1:PriceId>0</ns1:PriceId>
<ns1:ChargeType>OtherCharges</ns1:ChargeType>
<ns1:Amount>0.00</ns1:Amount>
</ns1:ChargeBreakUp>
</ns1:ChargeBU>
and then when it finds the same node it does this
<ns1:ChargeBU href=\"#ref1\"/>
So how can i prevent this so that it includes the full node again instead of just passing the reference ??

Answer 1

I had the same issue but couldn't figure out anything to do differently within SoapClient to fix it. i ended up overriding __doRequest() to modify the xml before sending to remove the reference id's from the elements and replace the reference elements with the elements they reference. if you do this, be sure to fix __getLastRequest() as shown here.
Edit: Using unserialize(serialize($input)) before sending seems to have fixed this for me.

Answer 2

you can create a new copy (instance) of that array to prevent php to use refs for the same values.
for example, we have:
$item = array(
"id" => 1,
"name" => "test value"
);
and our request/response:
$response = array(
"item1" => $item,
"item2" => $item
);
by default, php will replace item2 value with reference to item1 (both items point to the same array)
in order to prevent such behaviour, we need to create two different items with the same structure, something like:
function copyArray($source){
$result = array();
foreach($source as $key => $item){
$result[$key] = (is_array($item) ? copyArray($item) : $item);
}
return $result;
}
and request/response:
$response = array(
"item1" => copyArray($item),
"item2" => copyArray($item)
);
the same by structure items are in fact different arrays in memory and php will not generate any refs in this case

Answer 3

I did some research, and SOAP extension, nuSOAP, WSO2 are not supported since 2010. They are full of unfixed bugs, I don't recommend to use them.
Use Zend 2 SOAP instead which does not use any unsupported extension, or if you are a Symfony fan, then try out the BeSimple SOAP boundle, which tries to fix the bugs of the SOAP extension. Don't reinvent the wheel!

Answer 4

I have changed the function a little bit because. if the $source is not an array ,we have a small problem in the foreach
function copyArray(Array $source){
$result = array();
if($source) { // not for empty arrays
foreach($source as $key => $item){
$result[$key] = (is_array($item) ? copyArray($item) : $item);
}
}
return $result;
}