PHP Cookbook

12.8. Sending SOAP Requests

Problem

You want to send a SOAP request. Creating a SOAP client allows you to gather information from SOAP servers, regardless of their operating system and middleware software.

Solution

Use PEAR’s SOAP classes. Here’s some client code that uses the GoogleSearch SOAP service:

require 'SOAP/Client.php';

$query = 'php'; // your Google search terms

$soap = new SOAP_Client('http://api.google.com/search/beta2');

$params = array(
            new SOAP_Value('key',        'string',  'your google key'),
            new SOAP_Value('q',          'string',  $query),
            new SOAP_Value('start',      'int',     0),
            new SOAP_Value('maxResults', 'int',     10),
            new SOAP_Value('filter',     'boolean', false),
            new SOAP_Value('restrict',   'string',  ''),
            new SOAP_Value('safeSearch', 'boolean', false),
            new SOAP_Value('lr',         'string',  'lang_en'),
            new SOAP_Value('ie',         'string',  ''),
            new SOAP_Value('oe',         'string',  ''));

$hits = $soap->call('doGoogleSearch', $params, 'urn:GoogleSearch');

foreach ($hits->resultElements as $hit) {
    printf('<a href="%s">%s</a><br />', $hit->URL, $hit->title);
}

Discussion

The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), is, like XML-RPC, a method for exchanging information over HTTP. It uses XML as its message format, which makes it easy to create and parse. As a result, because it’s platform- and language-independent, SOAP is available on many platforms and in many languages, including PHP. To make a SOAP request, you instantiate a new SOAP_Client object and pass the constructor the location of the page to make the ...