Cannot read web service response

[2planks]

Hi,

I'm calling a web service in PHP and am having difficulties dealing with the response, in terms of how to read from the XML I get returned.

I create the SOAP client object and call the web service like this:

 $client = new SoapClient('http://blahblah/eventservice.asmx?wsdl',
	      array(
		'trace' => 1,
		'login' => $username, 
		'password' => $password));

  $response = $client->Sports();

If I do a print_r of the response, here is the message returned by the web service:

print_r($response);

stdClass Object
(
    [Result] => stdClass Object
        (
            [any] => <sports expirydate="2010-01-13T11:09:00"><sport ID="1" desc="Football"/><sport ID="2" desc="American Football"/><sport ID="3" desc="Basketball"/>
            ...
            ...
            </sports>
        )

)

From this, I assumed that I got an XML object back and can get to the data items using '->' but although it partly works, I can't get to the <sport> elements and it is driving me a bit mad.

If I try this:

$xml = $response->Result;
print_r ($xml);

...then it gives me the contents of the 'Result' element, as I would expect, like this:

stdClass Object
(
    [any] => <sports expirydate="2010-01-13T11:09:00"><sport ID="1" desc="Football"/><sport ID="2" desc="American Football"/><sport ID="3" desc="Basketball"/>
    ...
    ...
    </sports>
)

But how do I access the <sport> elements? What does [any] mean?

What I am trying to do is print a list of the 'desc' attributes, i.e. 'Basketball' but whatever I try does not work.

  $sports = $xml->sports;  		// Does not work: Undefined property: stdClass::$sports
  $sport = $xml->sport[1]; 		// Does not work: Undefined property: stdClass::$sport
  $sport = $xml->sports->sport[1];	//Undefined property: stdClass::$sports, Trying to get property of non-object

I also tried to use the SimpleXML library like this but it fails:

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($response->Result);  

// Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'SimpleXMLElement::__construct() expects parameter 1 to be string, object given'

What I would like to do is something like this:

// Does not work:
// Undefined property: stdClass::$sports
// Invalid argument supplied for foreach()

  foreach ($response->Result->sports as $sport)
    echo "ID" .  $sport['ID'] . " description is " . $sport['desc'];

I'm sure I am doing something really dumb here but can't figure it out. Any comments or suggestions gratefully received! Thank you.

[halojoy]

Think that site has not correct XML output.
So it is not your script, that is doing bad.

[2planks]

Sorted!!!

If I do this:

 echo $client->__getLastResponse()

then I do get a full SOAP response back, like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<soap:Body>
<SportsResponse xmlns="http://blahblah.com/Events"><Result xmlns="">
<sports expirydate="2010-01-13T12:05:00">
<sport ID="1" desc="Football" />
<sport ID="2" desc="American Football" />
<sport ID="3" desc="Basketball" />
...
...
</sports></Result></SportsResponse></soap:Body></soap:Envelope>

...so here is what I have done to get this working:

$xmlstring = $client->__getLastResponse();

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstring);

$elem = $xml->xpath('//sport');
foreach ($elem as $sport)
	echo $sport['desc'] . "\n";

I'm not sure that this is the 'proper' way to use a web service, but it has had the desired result.

Thank you.