What's the best way to use SOAP with Ruby?

Question

A client of mine has asked me to integrate a 3rd party API into their Rails app. The only problem is that the API uses SOAP. Ruby has basically dropped SOAP in favor of RE

Answer 1

Try SOAP4R

• SOAP4R
• Getting Started with SOAP4R

And I just heard about this on the Rails Envy Podcast (ep 31):

• WS-Deathstar SOAP walkthrough

Answer 2

I also recommend Savon. I spent too many hours trying to deal with Soap4R, without results. Big lack of functionality, no doc.

Savon is the answer for me.

Answer 3

I have used SOAP in Ruby when i've had to make a fake SOAP server for my acceptance tests. I don't know if this was the best way to approach the problem, but it worked for me.

I have used Sinatra gem (I wrote about creating mocking endpoints with Sinatra here) for server and also Nokogiri for XML stuff (SOAP is working with XML).

So, for the beginning I have create two files (e.g. config.rb and responses.rb) in which I have put the predefined answers that SOAP server will return. In config.rb I have put the WSDL file, but as a string.

@@wsdl = '<wsdl:definitions name="StockQuote"
         targetNamespace="http://example.com/stockquote.wsdl"
         xmlns:tns="http://example.com/stockquote.wsdl"
         xmlns:xsd1="http://example.com/stockquote.xsd"
         xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/"
         xmlns="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/">
         .......
      </wsdl:definitions>'

In responses.rb I have put samples for responses that SOAP server will return for different scenarios.

@@login_failure = "<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
    <s:Body>
        <LoginResponse xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">
            <LoginResult xmlns:a="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/WEBMethodsObjects" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
                <a:Error>Invalid username and password</a:Error>
                <a:ObjectInformation i:nil="true"/>
                <a:Response>false</a:Response>
            </LoginResult>
        </LoginResponse>
    </s:Body>
</s:Envelope>"

So now let me show you how I have actually created the server.

require 'sinatra'
require 'json'
require 'nokogiri'
require_relative 'config/config.rb'
require_relative 'config/responses.rb'

after do
# cors
headers({
    "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" => "*",
    "Access-Control-Allow-Methods" => "POST",
    "Access-Control-Allow-Headers" => "content-type",
})

# json
content_type :json
end

#when accessing the /HaWebMethods route the server will return either the WSDL file, either and XSD (I don't know exactly how to explain this but it is a WSDL dependency)
get "/HAWebMethods/" do
  case request.query_string
    when 'xsd=xsd0'
        status 200
        body = @@xsd0
    when 'wsdl'
        status 200
        body = @@wsdl
  end
end

post '/HAWebMethods/soap' do
request_payload = request.body.read
request_payload = Nokogiri::XML request_payload
request_payload.remove_namespaces!

if request_payload.css('Body').text != ''
    if request_payload.css('Login').text != ''
        if request_payload.css('email').text == some username && request_payload.css('password').text == some password
            status 200
            body = @@login_success
        else
            status 200
            body = @@login_failure
        end
    end
end
end

I hope you'll find this helpful!

Answer 4

I built Savon to make interacting with SOAP webservices via Ruby as easy as possible.
I'd recommend you check it out.

Answer 5

Just got my stuff working within 3 hours using Savon.

The Getting Started documentation on Savon's homepage was really easy to follow - and actually matched what I was seeing (not always the case)

Answer 6

We used the built in soap/wsdlDriver class, which is actually SOAP4R. It's dog slow, but really simple. The SOAP4R that you get from gems/etc is just an updated version of the same thing.

Example code:

require 'soap/wsdlDriver'

client = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new( 'http://example.com/service.wsdl' ).create_rpc_driver
result = client.doStuff();

That's about it