Consume SOAP Service from RhoMobile (iPhone, Android, WM and so on) apps

We wanted to consume simple SOAP based web services from the iPhone, Android applications using RhoMobile framework. We dont want to use Savon as it got too much dependency to become rhodes-ruby extension.
Just thought lets write the raw soap client without using SOAP gems. Rhodes already support net-http and rexml(rhoxml) for such tasks.

The sample source code can be found at https://github.com/spritle/rhodes_soap_test/blob/master/app/Soap/soap_controller.rb which basically consume the SOAP services from http://www.w3schools.com/webservices/tempconvert.asmx
The basic steps involve on the controller side involves:

1. Initialize the http object with soap service url
   [source language=”ruby”]
   http = Net::HTTP.new(‘www.w3schools.com’, 80)
   path = ‘/webservices/tempconvert.asmx’ [/source]
2. Create the SOAP Request envelope
   [source language=”ruby”]
   data = <<-EOF
   
   
   
   #{celsius}
   
   
   
   EOF
   [/source]
3. Set Headers if required
   [source language=”ruby”]
   headers = {
   ‘Content-Type’ => ‘text/xml’,
   ‘Host’ => ‘spritle.com’
   }
   [/source]
4. Make the http request and then process the result data
   [source language=”ruby”]
   resp, data = http.post(path, data, headers)
   puts data
   [/source]
5. Sample SOAP Response
   [source language=”ruby”]
   89.6
   [/source]

If you want you can also the process the SOAP Response string using XML parsers like rhoxml.
Example:
[source language=”ruby”]
xmldoc = REXML::Document.new(data)
xmldoc.elements.each(“soap:Envelope/soap:Body/CelsiusToFahrenheitResponse/CelsiusToFahrenheitResult”) { |e| puts e.text
}
[/source]
If you want to see how we can use savon as rhodes-ruby-extensions, please leave us a comment so that we can share our code on Github.