12.10.1. Problem

12.10.2. Solution

require 'SOAP/Server.php';

class pc_SOAP_return_time {
    var $method_namespace = 'urn:pc_SOAP_return_time';

    function return_time( ) {
        return date('Ymd\THis');
    }
}

$rt = new pc_SOAP_return_time( );

$server = new SOAP_Server;
$server->addObjectMap($rt);
$server->service($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);

12.10.3. Discussion

There are three steps to creating a SOAP server with PEAR's SOAP_Server class:

1. Create a class to process SOAP methods and instantiate it

2. Create an instance of a SOAP server and associate the processing object with the server

3. Instruct the SOAP server to process the request and reply to the SOAP client

class pc_SOAP_return_time {
    var $method_namespace = 'urn:pc_SOAP_return_time';

    function return_time( ) {
        return date('Ymd\THis');
    }
}

$rt = new pc_SOAP_return_time( );

Once the class is defined, you create an instance of the class to link methods with the SOAP server object. Before mapping the procedures to the class methods, however, you first must instantiate a SOAP_Server object:

$server = new SOAP_Server;
$server->addObjectMap($rt);
$server->service($GLOBALS['HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA']);

To call this procedure using a PEAR SOAP client, use this code:

require 'SOAP/Client.php';
$soapclient = new SOAP_Client('http://clock.example.com/time-soap.php');
$result = $soapclient->call('return_time', array( ),
                             array('namespace' => 'urn:pc_SOAP_return_time'));
print "The local time is $result.\n";

This prints:

The local time is 20020821T132615.

To extend the method to read in parameters, you need to alter the method prototype to include parameter names and then modify the client request to include data for the additional arguments. This example modifies the SOAP procedure to accept an optional time zone argument:

class pc_SOAP_return_time {
    var $method_namespace = 'urn:pc_SOAP_return_time';

    function return_time($tz='') {
        if ($tz) { putenv("TZ=$tz"); }
        $date = date('Ymd\THis');
        if ($tz) { putenv('TZ=EST5EDT'); } // change EST5EDT to your server's zone 
        return $date
    }
}

The second parameter in the client's call now takes a tz option:

$result = $soapclient->call('return_time', array('tz' => 'PST8PDT'),
                             array('namespace' => 'urn:pc_SOAP_return_time'));

With the new settings, the server returns a time three hours behind the previous one:

20020821T202615

12.10.4. See Also