DEFAULT_HTTP_CONTENT_TYPE='application/soap+xml'

SOAP Web Service Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Perl SOAP::Lite 0.710 for SOAP 1.2 Web Services

∟DEFAULT_HTTP_CONTENT_TYPE='application/soap+xml'

This section provides a tutorial example on how to override the constant DEFAULT_HTTP_CONTENT_TYPE in the SOAP::Lite module to use 'application/soap+xml' for SOAP 1.2.

At this point, the last issue of using SOAP::Lite to call the SOAP 1.2 GetSpeech Web service is to set the "application/soap+xml" as the media type in the Content-Type header line.

How should I do this? The SOAP::Lite manual does not offer any explicit method for me to reset Content-Type header line.

I did some research on the Internet, and found no suggestions on how to control Content-Type with SOAP::Lite.

So I had to read the source code of SOAP::Lite and related modules. If you open \local\Perl\site\lib\SOAP\Transport\HTTP.pm, you will see this code segment:

sub send_receive {
...
      if(!$http_request->content_type) {
          $http_request->content_type(join '; ',
               $SOAP::Constants::DEFAULT_HTTP_CONTENT_TYPE,
               !$SOAP::Constants::DO_NOT_USE_CHARSET && $encoding
                   ? 'charset=' . lc($encoding)
                   : ()
          );
      }
...
}

This logic says, if $http_request->content_type is defined explicitly, use it as is. Otherwise, built it based on the constant, $SOAP::Constants::DEFAULT_HTTP_CONTENT_TYPE.

If my understanding is correct, my first option is to fix the constant DEFAULT_HTTP_CONTENT_TYPE. If you open \local\Perl\site\lib\SOAP\Constants.pm, you will see this section:

    1.2 => {
        NEXT_ACTOR                => URI_SOAP12_NEXT_ACTOR,
        NS_ENV                    => URI_SOAP12_ENV,
        NS_ENC                    => URI_SOAP12_ENC,
        DEFAULT_XML_SCHEMA        => URI_2001_SCHEMA_XSD,
        DEFAULT_HTTP_CONTENT_TYPE => 'application/soap',
    },

Obviously, I can reset this constant after I run $client->soapversion('1.2') like this:

#- GetSpeech_Default_HTTP_Content_Type.pl
#- Copyright (c) 2009 HerongYang.com. All Rights Reserved.
#- All rights reserved
#
   use SOAP::Lite +trace;
   my $client = SOAP::Lite->new()
      ->soapversion('1.2')
      ->envprefix('soap12')
      ->default_ns('http://xmlme.com/WebServices')
      ->on_action( sub {join '/', @_} )
      ->readable(true)
      ->proxy('http://localhost/WSShakespeare.asmx');

#- Overriding the constant
   $SOAP::Constants::DEFAULT_HTTP_CONTENT_TYPE 
      = 'application/soap+xml';

   my $som = $client->call('GetSpeech', 
      SOAP::Data->name("Request")
      ->value("To be, or not to be")
   );

Result of GetSpeech_Default_HTTP_Content_Type.pl:

POST http://localhost/WSShakespeare.asmx HTTP/1.1
Accept: text/xml
Accept: multipart/*
Accept: application/soap
Content-Length: 606
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8
SOAPAction: http://xmlme.com/WebServices/GetSpeech
...

It worked! Remember you must override DEFAULT_HTTP_CONTENT_TYPE after calling soapversion('1.2'), not before. soapversion('1.2') triggers the 1.2 version of constants to be used.