This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Perl Buzz by Chris Winters. Original Post: Deserializing Java Vectors with SOAP::Lite Feed Title: cwinters.com Feed URL: http://www.cwinters.com/raw/cwinters_perl.rdf Feed Description: Chris Winters on Perl, programming and technology Latest Perl Buzz Posts Latest Perl Buzz Posts by Chris Winters Latest Posts From cwinters.com

I'm seriously using SOAP for the first time and came to a stumbling block. I'm testing a SOAP interface with SOAP::Lite since it's is supposed to be available from different environments/languages. But one of the methods I'm calling has the signature:

    public Vector fetchAllThingies()...

It's really just an array so it should be a piece of cake, right? Nope. SOAP::Lite doesn't seem to support multiple return values, or a single return value representing multiple objects. Everything seems to work, but if you ask for the result you only get the last item.

After floundering for a bit I found a soaplite mailing list post from Paul that basically said, "Yeah, we don't do that, but here's another way." Using that you should be able to get into a Vector of simple hashtables (probably Objects too, haven't tested yet) with this not-necessarily-definitive fix:

my $result = SOAP::Lite->new()
    ->uri( 'urn:SomeThingies' )
    ->proxy( 'http://somehost/SOAP' )
    ->fetchAllThingies();
   
# '//return/item' is an XPath expression...
my @thingies = $result->valueof( '//return/item' );
   
foreach my $thingy ( @thingies ) {
    # $thingy isa hashref with keys/values as you'd expect
}

We'll see what more fun awaits... but a positive benefit of being exposed to SOAP is that I'll understand how this OpenInteract2 handler works and hopefully put it in the next version.