Handsoap with ASP.Net

30 Sep 2009

Soap4r wasn’t unusable for me but I didn’t like using it. When things lined up correctly everything was rosy but trying to debug when a problem occurred was very difficult. Handsoap to the rescue.

Handsoap doesn’t try to do your work for you, it just tries to get out of the way and perform the lower level http calls while providing a toolbox and pattern to help you generate xml requests and parse xml responses. I’m not going to give a further description. I just want to walk through how I use it with ASP.Net web services.

Use ASP.net Previews

ASP.net 2.0 “.asmx” files get rendered in a browser as a human readable list of SOAP methods. When you click on a method name it renders a helpful set of SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2 sample request and response.

List of ASP.Net Methods

List of ASP.Net sample request and response

Tests to Parse the Response

I don’t write tests to ensure my requests are correct. I should but for now I just test that I am parsing the response correctly. This example just returns a simple string so I copy the sample response XML from the web service and paste it into a test like below and replace the place holder “string” with a sample value “jojojo”:

    def test_get_user_info_result
        response_xml = '
        
          
            
              jojojo
            
          
        '

        api = SpoktApi.new
        mock_response(api, response_xml)
        
        result = api.get_user_info("dan")
        assert_equal('jojojo', result)
    end

The mock_response method is in my test helper:

  def mock_response(api, xml)
    response = Handsoap::Http::Response.new(200,[],xml)
    api.expects(:send_http_request).returns(response)
  end