Simple Object Access Protocol: A Step-By-Step Approach

n the article, we will create a simple SOAP service, and a client to access that service. The service will be in the form of an Active Server Page, which I have called soap.asp—it will need to live in the root directory of your Personal Web Service (by default c:\inetpub\wwwroot\) Our service will accept and process SOAP requests made by our client—a VB exe, with a single module, and a start-up Sub Main().

As we know, SOAP is a call-response mechanism, which operates in a client-server paradigm. The client (your application) makes a call to the server (a web server, somewhere on the internet), passing in parameters; and the server provides a response. Both call and response are transported in the form of XML documents. Therefore, to build our own example SOAP system, we need both a client and a server—a caller and a responder.

The example we will follow is a very simple one: we will build a service that will calculate the tax due on a sales transaction. In traditional VB terms well will create a function with the following definition:

Public Function GetSalesTax(ByVal pSalesTotal As Double) as Double
  GetSalesTax = pSalesTotal * 0.04
End Function

Crude, but effective (if you live in a state where the sales tax rate is 4%!)

This function defines a method name (GetSalesTax), a parameter (pSalesTotal—representing the total value of the sale) and a return value (the result of the function). In more traditional object-oriented terms, we might think of pSalesTotal as an IN parameter, and the GetSalesTax result as an OUT parameter. Quite straightforwardly: sales-total in; sales-tax out. A SOAP service can be thought of in terms of IN and OUT parameters—the client passes IN parameters to the server, and then receives the OUT parameters in return. So, in order to create our SOAP service, we need a server that will listen for requests to GetSalesTax, accompanied by IN parameters, and which will respond with OUT parameters, indicating the correct tax amount. Let’s start with the client— the caller. How do we call the SOAP service to make our request.

The Client
In traditional VB terms, our request to the GetSalesTax function described above, would be something such as:

dblSalesTax = GetSalesTax(100)

Returning a value of $4.

If the GetSalesTax function was contained within an external object, such as an MTS server, then the call would need to reference the server DLL:

Dim objTax As New CTaxCalc
dblSalesTax = objTax.GetSalesTax(100)

In a SOAP system the call is little different, only the request is formatted as an XML document, which is passed up to the server. The appropriate document contains the same details as the MTS call—a method to call, and the parameter name and value.

<GetSalesTax>
 <SalesTotal>100</SalesTotal>
<GetSalesTax>

In order to ensure that the server can correctly identify and decrypt this method call, it is wrapped up in a larger document, called a SOAP envelope, which references the universal name-space of the SOAP envelope standard.

<SOAP:Envelope xmlns:SOAP="urn:schemas-xmlsoap-org:soap.v1">
    <SOAP:Header></SOAP:Header>
    <SOAP:Body>
        <GetSalesTax>
            <SalesTotal>100</SalesTotal>
        <GetSalesTax>
    </SOAP:Body>
</SOAP:Envelope>

Finally, to complete our SOAP request document, we will add a name-space reference to our method call, which points to the object which contains the method—the equivalent of the object declaration (Dim objTax As New CTaxCalc) in our MTS method call.

<SOAP:Envelope xmlns:SOAP="urn:schemas-xmlsoap-org:soap.v1">
    <SOAP:Header></SOAP:Header>
    <SOAP:Body>
        <m:GetSalesTax xmlns:m="urn:myserver/soap:TaxCalc">
            <SalesTotal>100</SalesTotal>
        </m:GetSalesTax>
    </SOAP:Body>
</SOAP:Envelope>

Now that we have built our SOAP request document, we are ready to send it to the server. The request is a simple HTTP post—just like posting a web form in your internet browser. Of course, your internet browser masks all the complexity of sending a form to a server; and in the longer-term .NET will mask this process from your VB code too. But for now, we need to do the job ourselves; and I have been using Microsoft’s XML HTTP Request object to give me a helping hand. (The XMLHTTPRequest is an object within the MSXML class library (MSXML.DLL), and it comes with IE5.) Assuming that strEnvelope contains the XML document described above, the request is formatted thus:

Dim objHTTP As New MSXML.XMLHTTPRequest
Dim strEnvelope As String

'Set up to post to our localhost server
objHTTP.open "post", "http://localhost/soap/soap.asp"

'Set a standard SOAP/ XML header for the content-type
objHTTP.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "text/xml"

'Set a header for the method to be called
objHTTP.setRequestHeader "SOAPMethodName", _
    "urn:myserver/soap:TaxCalc#GetSalesTax"

'Make the SOAP call
objHTTP.send strEnvelope

'Get the return value
strReturn = objHTTP.responseBody

Now that we have sent our request, we move to the server, to see how we set up a SOAP service to listen and respond to our calls.

The Server
Our server needs to be configured to accept the HTTP post sent by the client. It will be noted that we direct the client’s post to a URL on our local server—http://localhost/soap.asp. So our first job is to create this page, to listen for, and process, SOAP calls to our server. We know that our ASP will receive an XML document, in the form of an HTTP post, with a method name (GetSalesTax), and a parameter (SalesTotal). So, to write our basic listener service, all we need do is deconstruct the body of the request (the SOAP envelope) and pull out the value of the SalesTotal parameter.

The SOAP envelope posted by the client is contained in the body of the request, or in ASP terms the Request object; and because it is XML, we can load it into an instance of Microsoft’s XMLDOM in our ASP. Soap.asp begins like this:

Set objReq = Server.CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM")
objReq.Load Request

Thus objReq contains the SOAP envelope we created on the client, and we can extract the value of the SalesTotal parameter by running an XSL pattern query, using the SelectSingleNode method of the XML DOM object :

strQuery = "SOAP:Envelope/SOAP:Body/m:GetSalesTax/SalesTotal" 
varSalesTotal = objReq.SelectSingleNode(strQuery).Text

With the parameter extracted, we can make our calculation to get the sales-tax:

varSalesTax = varSalesTotal * 0.04