SOAP: technotes

Our present SOAP interface has been built with SOAP 1.1 and WSDL 1.1, both of which being standards recommended^* by the World Wide Web Comsortium (W3C). This means that there is a wide range of applications and programing languages that can access our database.

Our implementation uses the NuSOAP PHP Library. The SOAP endpoint can be found at here. If you point a web browser (as opposed to a SOAP client) to our endpoint, then you will see the latest generated (brief) documentation. The WDSL file can be found at here.

If you wish to learn about SOAP and WSDL, then have a look at W3Schools.com for some good tutorials on the subject.

Additional notes

^*SOAP 1.1 and WSDL 1.1 are not official W3C recommendations but W3C note's. The official recommendations currently are SOAP 1.2 and WSDL 2.0 but since these are quite new there are few implementations of them. That is why we have chosen the older and more widely supported Notes until better support for the Recommendations is available.

^*As per the NuSOAP Forums, a naming conflict issue may exists between the PHP5 built-in soap and the NuSoap PHP Library that may result in a "Cannot redeclare class soapclient" error. This can be resolved by renaming all instances of the class "soapclient" in the 10 nusoap library files to another name and use that class name in your code. In our example code we have used "soapclient_nusoap".