SOAP request with attribute - php

Question

I can not seem to find out how to set an attribute to a SOAP request without using the XSD_ANYXML encoding.
The request parameter should look as follows
<request
xmlns:ns="/some/ns">
...
<ns:parameter attr="some attribute">
value
</ns:parameter>
...
</request>
Of course the following code works, but it's rather ugly (ugly, because it uses string concatenation where it should use the SOAP_Client API and because it does not use the general namespace)
$param = new SoapVar(
'<ns_xxx:parameter xmlns:ns_xxx="/some/ns" attr="some attribute">
value
</ns_xxx:parameter>',
XSD_ANYXML
);
Is there a better way to create a SOAP request parameter with a namespace and an attribute?
I am looking for s.th. like the following (this is just some pseudo code using the SoapVar API):
$param = new SoapVar(
array(
'_' => 'value',
'attr' => 'some attribute'
),
SOME_ENCODING,
null,
null,
null,
'/some/ns'
);

Answer 1

For this, you need to derived the class from SoapClient and Override the method __doRequest():
class ABRSoapClient extends SoapClient {
// return xml request
function __doRequest($request, $location, $action, $version) {
$dom = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$xml= $dom->loadXML($request);
// Goto request Node and Set the attribute
$attr_ns = $dom->createAttributeNS('xmlns:ns', '' ); // instead of xmlns:ns use Namespace URL
$attr_ns->value = '/some/ns';
// add atribute in businessReport node
$dom->getElementsByTagName($report_type)->item(0)->appendChild( $attr_ns );
$request = $dom->saveXML();
return parent::__doRequest($request, $location, $action, $version);
}
}
$client = new ABRSoapClient(.....);
$save_result = $client->request($param);
// You can check the form request using function
$client->__getLastRequest();
I hope this will resolve your problem.

Answer 2

SOAP does not support attributes, may be you should use REST instead!
EDIT:
Please check the body style w3c:"4.3 SOAP Body" and remember that
you need to encode your message with "soap-envelope" namespace and describe
your XML types thats why, you can't use attributes to describe your message data.
But if you ask me, it can be made possible! You can use a custom SoapClient parser or something like that and convert your message as you like it.
A example of that may be RSS over SOAP http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soaprdf.
But, the problem would be that you would miss the descriptive information about your message data/types and other clients could not easy understand your messages!
My best practice for you would be to use elements instead of attributes,
i know you need to fix your XML schema but thats the way it goes or switch to a other technology.

Answer 3

SOAP 1 does support attributes. Here is an example of Perl code using both attributes and values (from a client):
$som = $client->call(
'tran:getContent',
SOAP::Header->name('cred:credentials')->attr({
'username' => $username,
'password' => 'xxx',
'customerID' => 'xxx'}
),
SOAP::Data->name('contentID')->value('9999')
)