PHP Cookbook

12.9. Receiving SOAP Requests

Problem

You want to create an SOAP server and respond to SOAP requests. If your server responds to SOAP requests, anyone on the Internet that has a SOAP client can make requests of your server.

Solution

Use PEAR’s SOAP_Server class. Here’s a server that returns the current date and time:

require 'SOAP/Server.php';

class pc_SOAP_return_time {
    var $method_namespace = 'urn:pc_SOAP_return_time';

    function return_time( ) {
        return date('Ymd\THis');
    }
}

$rt = new pc_SOAP_return_time( );

$server = new SOAP_Server;
$server->addObjectMap($rt);
$server->service($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);

Discussion

There are three steps to creating a SOAP server with PEAR’s SOAP_Server class:

1. Create a class to process SOAP methods and instantiate it

2. Create an instance of a SOAP server and associate the processing object with the server

3. Instruct the SOAP server to process the request and reply to the SOAP client

The PEAR SOAP_Server class uses objects to handle SOAP requests. A request-handling class needs a $method_namespace property that specifies the SOAP namespace for the class. In this case, it’s urn:pc_SOAP_return_time. Object methods then map to SOAP procedure names within the namespace. The actual PHP class name isn’t exposed via SOAP, so the fact that both the name of the class and its $method_namespace are identical is a matter of convenience, not of necessity:

class pc_SOAP_return_time { var $method_namespace = 'urn:pc_SOAP_return_time'; function return_time( ) { return date('Ymd\THis'); ...