[Soap-Python] Returning an extensible array of key, value pairs from a SOAP service

[Tres Seaver]

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On 12/01/2010 06:29 AM, Dieter Maurer wrote:
> Michael Wood wrote at 2010-12-1 09:16 +0200:
>> I'm pretty new to SOAP and soaplib.
>>
>> Is there a way to have a list of key, value pairs where the values
>> could be any primitive type, or possibly a structure and return that
>>from a SOAP service?
> 
> A long time ago, I made something like this with
> ZSI (and Zope). While this has been a SOAP (based) service,
> it was not described by a WSDL but instead used dynamic typing
> (each value in the SOAP message used an "xsi:type" attribute to
> specify its type).
> 
> I expect that you want a WSDL described service.
> 
> In principle, WSDL (more precisely "XML-Schema" on which WSDL depends)
> supports so called "urtype"s, among others an "anyType" "urtype".
> This is however an advanced feature. Frameworks might have
> difficulties with it (I met e.g. difficulties with "PyXB", quickly
> fixed by its author).
> 
> I do know the "soaplib" details -- and wether it can handle
> arbitrary types.
> 
>   >So something like a Dict, where I can add to the
>> entries in the Dict over time without the WSDL changing.  I'm using
>> the 1.0 branch of soaplib.
>>
>> I'll need to consume this from a client written in C/C++.
> 
> Then, this client, too, must be able to handle "xsi:type" attributes.
> Maybe, this is even a stronger restriction than on the Python side.
> 
>> If this is not possible, I'll just stick with a class with predefined
>> fields and use the ClassSerializer, but it would be nice if I could
>> avoid the WSDL changing and therefore having to update the client if I
>> add new fields to the class/dict/whatever.
> 
> Maybe, other techniques would be more adequate for you
> (e.g. XML-RPC, JSON-RPC, ...)? They are "by nature" dynamic,
> not restricted by a static description.

You can define a method in soaplib as returnning 'Array(Any)'.  Whether
a given client can handle that or not is a separate issue.


Tres.
- -- 
===================================================================
Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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