Datacollector engine - using SOAP with a Class

Thursday 24 April 2003 8:38:24 am

Hello
I'm not sure if this is how to use the SOAP engine, but Is it possible to define a class with some attributes (Name, Description, Picture, etc) and then write a SOAP-server interface to the class?

By doing this I was hoping a 3 party program (like a datacollector engine) could automatically update and insert data to the system.

Can someone provide a small example of this?
Is there an easier way to do this?

MartOn

Thursday 24 April 2003 10:18:41 am

>I'm not sure if this is how to use the SOAP engine, but Is it
>possible to define a class with some attributes (Name,
>Description, Picture, etc) and then write a SOAP-server
>interface to the class?

Yes, but it requires quite some work. You need to wrap the functions for creating/updating objects as SOAP services.

Can't provide code for this as we are working on other soapy things with a "virtual" class where the (main) data does not reside in the ezp database, but is called with a SOAP client.

Paul

eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training
http://twitter.com/paulborgermans

Monday 28 April 2003 2:12:34 am

Sounds like there may be cross purposes here - you want to build a SOAP server right? So that content from your site can be made available to other sites?

If that's the case, you can probably achieve it simply using templates; rather than outputting XHTML, output XML instead as document / literal style SOAP. I've tried to explain the difference between RPC/encoded style SOAP and document / literal here: http://www.phppatterns.com/index.php/article/articleview/41/1/2/ - essentially RPC/encoded style is probably better for fetching data into eZ publish from an alternative source to the database, while doc/lit is probably better for publishing data from eZ publish to other sites. Where you'll probably need to make some code effort is in building a WSDL document to describe your service - perhaps this is something which can be integrated into eZ publish so that WSDL is built on the fly.

BTW; if you're looking for some examples of using eZ SOAP as a client to a web service, you may find this useful: http://www.phppatterns.com/index.php/article/articleview/40/1/2/

Monday 28 April 2003 6:05:03 pm

Done:

Overview:
http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/documentation/ez_publish_3/howtos/ez_soap_web_services_overview

Client:
http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/documentation/ez_publish_3/howtos/consuming_web_services_with_ez_soap_client

Server:
http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/documentation/ez_publish_3/howtos/deploying_soap_servers_with_ez_publish_3x

Tuesday 29 April 2003 5:14:20 am

Just why am I allowed to edit the howtos????

Visit http://triligon.org

Tuesday 29 April 2003 11:44:37 am

I may have explained myself alittle bit to difficult. What I would like to accomplish is:

I have a MS-SQL server containing "live" data and I want this data imported periodically into my eZ publish site.
How can I do this?

The reason I wanted to use the SOAP engine, was to abstract the import system from ezPublish system, to avoid version upgrade conflicts.

Any1 has any great Ideas?
Maybe the SOAP howtos should contain an example of an SOAP client inserting data into ezPublish. (for example Articles, Images)

MartOn

Monday 05 May 2003 11:24:26 am

Harry,

In the contributed SOAP article you said that the ez soap modules are unstable. I am using the PEAR modules, but might consider using the eZ ones... what was unstable about them?

Maybe the eZ team could answer.... Is it better for us to use Pear libraries in our extensions?

tia

Tony

Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood
Vision with Technology
Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development

Power to the Editor!

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Thursday 29 May 2003 7:49:16 pm

Tony,

"In the contributed SOAP article you said that the ez soap modules are unstable. I am using the PEAR modules, but might consider using the eZ ones... what was unstable about them?"

I think the eZ publish SOAP libraries have a good API but right now (or at least last time I looked - 3.02) there seemed to be problems like the client couldn't handle responses which were arrays or arrays. I didn't check too deeply so what the exact problem was but I found, when using a 3rd party server, some methods would work and others failed with PHP error notices generated from the eZ XML parser. I don't think eZ systems are really making use of SOAP yet so the code is likely to be unstable until it gets some extensive testing.

PEAR::SOAP is large but alot more mature than eZ SOAP so if you need to do something with SOAP, that's probably the best choice until eZ SOAP is stable. Where PEAR::SOAP has a real edge is it now supports WSDL consumption on the client side while being able to generate WSDL on the fly for a server (given a detailed dispatch map).

I'm not saying eZ systems should use PEAR as part of their distribution, given different licenses etc but at the same time, PEAR is rapidly maturing - these days I think don't knock it - with PHP5 there's a good chance PEAR will be a major resource.