A friend recently asked me how to go about writing code to access a SOAP API to perform a one-off task.
Below is the bare-bones step-by-step summary I sent him. I feel sorry for anyone encountering this travesty for the first time...
- Find a good free SOAP library (eg Apache Axis)
- Obtain the WSDL (Web Service Definition Language) document that describes the SOAP service you will talk to
- Feed the WSDL into a tool in your SOAP library to generate client stub code. This stub code exposes the services functionality and handles all communication. Each SOAP library should have such a tool, but they all work differently
- Write your program to use the client stub code. You will generally build up objects representing your data using classes provided in the client stub code, then call a "send" method of some sort to actually transmit that data to the SOAP service
- Hope like crazy that the SOAP library you chose is compatible with the library used by the service. If not, start again at point 1
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