README

This is a fork of Webservice helper from David Kingma. Original sources come from www.jool.nl/webservicehelper/. Original author : David Kingma davidjoolnl

Maintainer of this fork: Laurent Jouanneau web site: https://github.com/jelix/webservice-helper

What does the webservice helper?

The webservice helper does what the name says: helping you making a php class available as webservice. It generates the documentation, the webservice description file (WSDL) and handles errorhandling. It consists of three parts:

• extension of the PHP reflection classes to also parse the comments for information on parameter info and return values. The documentation and WSDL are generated from these classes.(see also documentation.php as an example)
• extension to the PHP SOAP implementation. It catches all normal exceptions and allows typehints in the webservice methods. (ie. saveContact(contact $contact))

Installation

Use Composer to install the library. Package name: jelix/webservice-helper.

If you don't want to use Composer, you can copy the content of the source code (all needed classes are into lib/), and you must create an autoloader (like in example/common.php or you must include all classes.

Manual

So how do you create your own webservice. As an example we create a webservice to add and show contacts. First you create a class called contactManager in the /example/data_objects with the public functions getContacts(), saveContact(contact $contact) and newContact(). To let the Webservice helper know what the parameters and return values of each method are we put a comment in front of each method specifying the parameters and return types. For example:

/**
 * This method saves the given contact
 * @return contact[] Array with all the contacts
 */
 public function getContacts(){}

/**
 * This method saves the given contact
 * @param contact The contact to save
 * @return void
 */
 public function saveContact(contact $contact){}

/**
 * This method saves the given contact
 * @return contact A new contact template
 */
 public function newContact(){}

/**
 * Gets the current contact list as associative array
 * @return contact[=>]  keys are contact name
 */
public function	getContactsAsAssoc() {}

We used the contact type as a return value for newContact() and getContacts() so we need to define what a contact looks like. For that we create a class called contact:

class contact{
	/** @var string */
	public $name;
	/** @var string */
	public $address;
}

Since string is (just as boolean and int) a known datatype we don't need to specify it any further.

The last thing we need to do to finish our webservice is to tell the webservice that de contactManager class is an allowed webservice and that contact is an allowed data- structure (for documentation purpose and classmap). In the config.php you add "contactmanager" to the WSClasses array and add "contact" to the WSStructures array.

You can now view the service documentation at /doc/documentation.php and the wsdl at /example/service.php?class=contactManager&wsdl

Note about associative array containing objects: if the soap server defines a classmap ('classmap' option to SoapServer in PHP), objects are wrapped into SoapVal objects, else they are simple stdClass objects.

FAQ

• My function doesn't showup in the documentation nor the WSDL file? Please check if it's a public function and it doesn't start with __

• It doesn't work!

  • Do you see any warnings in the generated documentation? Fix them
  • Check case sensitivity of class names
  • Did you check the javascript console to see if anything goes wrong?
  • Tried cleaning the wsdl cache in the WSDL cache directory?
  • Did you check the WSDL url in the client?

• Can I use the webservice helper in my own project? Yes you can use it under the terms of LGPL 2.1

• Can I contribute?

Yes, open an issue and/or a PR on https://github.com/jelix/webservice-helper

Example and unit tests

See tests/README.md