SOAP is a dirty word to me. But I have a need to interact with our CRM system to import / extract data. My go to platform for most of my PHP work is Laravel. So I looked at interacting with Lagan CRM using SOAP calls from PHP. I started off accessing the Lagan WSDL pages to see what the capabilities of the API are.
http://[laganserver:8080]/lagan/services/FL?WSDL
http://[laganserver:8080]/lagan/services/FLAuth?WSDL
http://[laganserver:8080]/lagan/schema/FLService.wsdlNow I can see the self documenting API calls I can make. I just need to create the SOAP envelope to pass data to the service with the call I want to make. To turn this into something I can use in Laravel I created a controller that has the capability to create the SOAP envelope, add the authentication header, structure the body with the Lagan type relating to my SOAPAction and POST the request. https://gist.github.com/warlord0/3b000a06734158f3c27445d08b8a12a2 The special problems I encountered were generating XML without the xml version header and removing the xmlns:lgn="lgn" namespace declarations that get added in during the build process of a SimpleXMLElement. I know there’s a SOAP client available in PHP and maybe longer term it’s something to look at, but I struggled to understand it. Hence my use of SimpleXML. In order to solve those issue I used dom_import_simplexml() to remove the xml version header and then used a regex search to remove the xmlns attributes. This provided a clean XML ($cleanXML) that works as a valid SOAP envelope to tell the Lagan API what I am asking for. With a clean XML string I can send that to my Lagan server using a GuzzleHttp POST request and include the Content-Type and SOAPAction headers. In my Gist above I’m using a call to retrieveCaseDetails a function name that matches the Lagan API SOAPAction. The Guzzle client response then returns the XML SOAP response from Lagan and I can now process that XML to do what I need with the data.
Version 2
During the course of the day I decided that using SimpleXMLElement was going to be too restrictive creating a reusable SOAP Envelope. I wanted something that would allow me to build the XML and include other XML objects as children. SimpleXML won’t do that. A popularly downloaded XMLBuilder called Oxymel seems to fit the gap. It uses a DOM builder and as such doesn’t have the namespace issues I had to correct in version 1. Using Oxymel I’m able to build the XML tag by tag and use namespaces without the issue of validation under SimpleXML. I’m also able to add another Oxymel object as a child along the way. My use of searchForCases is flexible enough to be passed different parameters for the FWTCaseSearch type. Now I can have my own function searchForOpenCases that passes the Status = open parameter to searchForCases, which is now reusable. https://gist.github.com/warlord0/b061a5f5513c5427e36ef8161f0c824c