The reason for the boring and seemingly pointless background is that ever since I wrote the app, I always wanted to integrate the website and application, but never really thought of a "good" way to do it. A couple days ago, I had some spare time and sat down to see how easy it would be to create some PHP webservices that I could easily consume in C#. I had been considering expanding the community aspect of the bind maker website into the application so that they'd work seamlessly together. I also wanted to add a common place that gaming communities could spend their time (which I had previously planned for just the website, but was thinking of the possibilities of bringing that into the app as well), and a PHP webservice combined with a C# windows app seemed like the best option.
C# webservices (server side) are about as easy-as-it-gets to write. C#'s SOAP client is completely transparent (or I should say completely generated so you code just like you would use any other objects) and is completely brainless to use. Since I'd never done webservice work in PHP, I started asking Mr. Google how it worked, and what would you now but that I stumbled across the NuSOAP library for php. It sure beat the heck out of writing all my WSDL files by hand, wrapping and unwrapping stupidly simple SOAP messages, and hacking everything very poorly.
My first PHP webservice iteration was a simple "hello <name> " web method. It used a simple type (xsd:string) as its parameter and returned a simple type (again another xsd:string) as its return value and looked like this:
- Code: Select all
/**
* ProcessSimpleType method
* @param string $who name of the person we'll say hello to
* @return string $helloText the hello string
*/
function ProcessSimpleType($who) {
return "Hello $who";
}
NuSoap was great. It took care of all the nitty-gritty work that I had previously done myself. All it took was about 8 lines of code to set up the SOAP server and register the method and my types.
require_once("lib/nusoap/nusoap.php");
$namespace = "http://sanity-free.org/services";
// create a new soap server
$server = new soap_server();
// configure our WSDL
$server->configureWSDL("SimpleService");
// set our namespace
$server->wsdl->schemaTargetNamespace = $namespace;
// register our WebMethod
$server->register(
// method name:
'ProcessSimpleType',
// parameter list:
array('name'=>'xsd:string'),
// return value(s):
array('return'=>'xsd:string'),
// namespace:
$namespace,
// soapaction: (use default)
false,
// style: rpc or document
'rpc',
// use: encoded or literal
'encoded',
// description: documentation for the method
'A simple Hello World web method');
// Get our posted data if the service is being consumed
// otherwise leave this data blank.
$POST_DATA = isset($GLOBALS['HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA'])
? $GLOBALS['HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA'] : '';
// pass our posted data (or nothing) to the soap service
$server->service($POST_DATA);
exit();
That was it. From visual studio I was then able to consume the webservice by adding a web reference
http://www.sanity-free.org/125/php_webservices_and_csharp_dotnet_soap_clients.html