[Soaplite-devel] Fwd: More info on SOAP::Lite document/literal

[Jason S. <jas...@gm...>]

Hey Soapers,

Here is a message I just posted to the MOBY group.

questions:
1) Why does SOAP::SOM::match() discard all the attributes on internal
XML elements? Isn't this a bug?
2) Why doesn't the SOM class have a method like document() that
returns the XML payload of the soap:Body tag? This seems important for
easy implementation of document/literal encoding.

Cheers, jas.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jason Stewart <jas...@gm...>
Date: Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 7:58 PM
Subject: More info on SOAP::Lite document/literal
To: Core developer announcements <mob...@li...>


Hey Eddie,

So I dug a bit on the server side and this is what I found.

If your server class subclasses from SOAP::Server::Parameters, the
method will get an extra parameter of type SOAP::SOM which gives
access to all the request information. That object contains a lot of
methods for searching the soap envelope - but it converts all the data
it finds into a SOAP::Data instance - which throws away all attributes
not located at the root of the data being returned. For example if the
XML looked like this:

<soap:Body>
 <q0:sayHello xmlns="urn:HelloWorld#">
   <name>Joe Blow</name>
   <givenName middlename="Windy">Joe</givenName>
 </q0:sayHello>
</soap:Body>

and we did a query like $root = $som->dataof('//Body'), then $root
would be the soap:Body and we would see all of the sub-elements but
not their attributes. Only if we do $gn = $som->dataof('//givenName')
do we actually get the givenName element with the middlename attribute
still intact.

But the $som object has all the information in an internal hash table
- both as a hash table representation of the entire message and the
HTTP::Request object with the original XML.

What I don't understand is why when the dataof() method traverses the
internal hash table structure it throws away all the attributes not on
the root element being returned.

Also, I don't understand why there isn't a method that just returns
the content of the soap:Body element as plain XML - this should be the
default behavior for document/literal. I would like to see a call
something like $xml = $som->document();

Any thoughts of how I could make this interface most useful for MOBY
purposes? I will have to alter the internal SOAP::Lite code, and send
the patches to the maintainers.

Cheers, jas.