Clear SOAP

can someone just clarify something about SOAP for me...

In the simple calculator examle I've downloaded, the server side code is written as a class module, yet i'm asked to deploy a WSDL document on the web server.

This WSDL document seems to be rather like an XML document, but where does it come from? (It's not created when I compile the Class, it was just included with the example code.)

Do I have to have a WSDL document, or can I just use the resulting DLL?

Is there a good book anybody can recommend?

The SDL or WSDL is the Service Description Language and is platfrom dependant.

Essentially it is an XML Document that describes your Web Services, and also points to the code that executes it.

It sounds like you are working within an MS environment so first lest assume that you have downloaded the MS Soap Toolkit?

With it, comes the SDL wizard - when you run this it will ask for you DLL - and then create the SDL (WSDL - SOAP 2.0?) for you.

Also, as part of the download you will get a listener.asp file. Move this to where you want your Web to execute the service from and then you have to reference this from within the wizard also.

This stuff really isn't too well documented - trial and error, but I have been trhough the loop so just mail me if you need any more help.

Regards
Dave

I've got the SOAP SDK 2.0b.

With it, there's a program called wsdlgen.exe, which, given a DLL or TLB and an ASP will create a WSDL file for me.

I'm following the instructions to use the Calculator Demo,but when I click to perform a calculation, I get the error

'WSDLReader:Loading of the WSDL file failed?'

followed by a load of garbage (usuallly something like this: ?????y???)

This is the same as I get when I try to connect to an invalud URL. I checked to make suere the IUSR has permissions for the files in the relevant folder, which it does, and the URL is correct.

Unfortunately I have not used 2.0 yet, but assuming it is pretty similar to 1.0.

There should be a ROPE.dll (Remote Object Proxy Engine) which MS uses to read in the WSDL files - is it possible that this is not correctly installed?

I've sorted that problem out, Dave.

Just in case you run into it yourself when you get change to v2.0, I had to download the WinHTTP Proxy Configuration Utility from Microsoft, because my machine was not set up to use a proxy.

There doesn't seem to be a ROPE.dll on my machine, although that doesn't mean isn't included with the tookit, i probably installed it wrong!

I'm now looking into another error: -

err.description = 'Automation error'
SoapClient.faultstring = 'Client: The message could not be send to it's destination'

Apparently this means access denied, but I've set up browsing on my web server and I can see all the files in that directory. Am i correct in thinking all of them should have read & execute permissions for IUSR?

Yeah this is a problem we have run into - What we ended up doing was creating a user specifically for the Web you are running services from and putting them in the PowerUser group!

Sounds extreme but it worked - If you are playing around creating ActiveX Components etc. then you need to have a user with relevent permissions.

Dave