call

 $soap->call( \%method, \@parts );

%method is a hash with the following keys:

 Name           Description
 ----------------------------------------------------
 operation      operation name
 soap_action    SOAPAction HTTP header to use
 style          Operation style. One of (document|rpc)
 use            SOAP body encoding. One of (literal|encoded)

The style and use keys have no influence yet.

@parts is a list containing the elements of the message parts.

For backward compatibility, call may also be called as below:

 $soap->call( $method, \@parts );

In this case, $method is the SOAP operation name, and the SOAPAction header is guessed from the first part's namespace and the operation name (which is mostly correct, but may fail). Operation style and body encoding are assumed to be document/literal

Configuration methods

 $soap->outputxml(1);

When set, call() returns the raw XML of the SOAP Envelope.

set_content_type

 $soap->set_content_type('application/xml; charset: utf8');

Sets the content type and character encoding.

You probably should not use a character encoding different from utf8: SOAP::WSDL::Client will not convert the request into a different encoding (yet).

To leave out the encoding, just set the content type without appending charset like this:

  $soap->set_content_type('text/xml');

Default:

 text/xml; charset: utf8

set_prefix

 $soap->set_prefix('ns2');

If set, alters the serialization of the request XML such that the supplied value is used as a namespace prefix for SOAP method calls. By way of example, the default XML serialization returns something like this:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <SOAP-ENV:Envelope
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
      <SOAP-ENV:Body>
        <getElementId xmlns="http://services.exmaple.org/">
          <elementId>12345</elementId>
        </getElementId>
      </SOAP-ENV:Body>
    </SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

If the sample set_prefix() call above is used prior to calling your SOAP method, the XML serialization returns this instead:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <SOAP-ENV:Envelope
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
        xmlns:ns2="http://services.example.org/">
      <SOAP-ENV:Body>
        <ns2:getElementId>
          <elementId>12345</elementId>
        </ns2:getElementId>
      </SOAP-ENV:Body>
    </SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

This is useful in cases where, for instance, one is communicating with a JAX <https://jax-ws.dev.java.net/> webservice, which tends to understand the latter but not the former. Note that this implementation is currently limited to a single additional namespace; if you require multiple custom namespaces, you should probably look into creating your own serializer.

Features different from SOAP::Lite

Nonetheless SOAP::WSDL mimics part of SOAP::Lite's API and behaviour, so SOAP::Lite users can switch without looking up every method call in the documentation.

A few things are quite different from SOAP::Lite, though:

SOAP request data

SOAP request data may either be given as message object, or as a hash ref (in which case it will automatically be encoded into a message object).

Return values

The result from call() is not a SOAP::SOM object, but a message object.

Message objects' classes may be generated from WSDL definitions automatically - see SOAP::WSDL::Generator::Typelib on how to generate your own WSDL based message class library.

Fault handling

SOAP::WSDL::Client returns a fault object on errors, even on transport layer errors.

The fault object is a SOAP1.1 fault object of the following "SOAP::WSDL::SOAP::Typelib::Fault11".

SOAP::WSDL::SOAP::Typelib::Fault11 objects are false in boolean context, so you can just do something like:

 my $result = $soap->call($method, $data);

 if ($result) {
    # handle result
 }
 else {
    die $result->faultstring();
 }

outputxml

SOAP::Lite returns only the content of the SOAP body when outputxml is set to true. SOAP::WSDL::Client returns the complete XML response.

Auto-Dispatching

SOAP::WSDL::Client does not support auto-dispatching.

This is on purpose: You may easily create interface classes by using SOAP::WSDL::Client and implementing something like

 sub mySoapMethod {
     my $self = shift;
     $soap_wsdl_client->call( mySoapMethod, @_);
 }

You may even do this in a class factory - see wsdl2perl.pl for creating such interfaces.

Accessing protected web services

In general, you may pass additional arguments to the set_proxy method (or a list ref of the web service address and any additional arguments to the new method's proxy argument).

Refer to the appropriate transport module for documentation.