SOAP4R clients with proxy and basic authentication

If you go and google "soap4r proxy" you'll get a lot of helpful hits that show you how to set your http_proxy environment variable. Unfortunately there's not many (read none) that are devoted to configuring it programatically. So here it is.

If you run the wsdl2r tool to generate code you'll end up with a defaultDriver.rb file. This defines the RPC driver that you can call the webservices against. You'll want to ensure that it's going to use the HTTPClient libraries. If you installed it manually you should be fine, but if you installed it with rubygems you'll need to add requires rubygems to the top of your file.

Next you'll need to add the basic authentication configuration and the proxy configuration to the SOAP driver (using some horrendously poorly documented features of the SOAP4R library). The best place to do this is in your initialize method. You'll end up with a class that resembles the following (I generated mine from a WSDL pertaining to sending SMS messages):

require 'rubygems'
require 'xsd/qname'
require 'httpclient'
require 'soap/rpc/driver'

class MessagingService < ::SOAP::RPC::Driver
 
  DefaultEndpointUrl = "https://a.secure.soap/endpoint"
  MappingRegistry = ::SOAP::Mapping::Registry.new
 
  Methods = [
    [ XSD::QName.new("https://somesoapgeneratedmappingname", "sendSMS"),
      "",
      "sendSMS",
      [ ["in", "to", ["::SOAP::SOAPString"]],
        ["in", "application", ["::SOAP::SOAPString"]],
        ["in", "message", ["::SOAP::SOAPString"]],
        ["in", "options", ["::SOAP::SOAPInt"]],
        ["retval", "sendSMSReturn", ["::SOAP::SOAPString"]] ],
      { :request_style =>  :rpc, :request_use =>  :encoded,
        :response_style => :rpc, :response_use => :encoded }
    ]
  ]

  def initialize(endpoint_url = nil)
    endpoint_url ||= DefaultEndpointUrl
    super(endpoint_url, nil)
    self.mapping_registry = MappingRegistry
    init_methods
    self.options["protocol.http.basic_auth"] << [endpoint_url,'username','password']
    self.options["protocol.http.proxy"] = "http://yourproxyserver:8080/"
  end

private

  def init_methods
    Methods.each do |definitions|
      opt = definitions.last
      if opt[:request_style] == :document
        add_document_operation(*definitions)
      else
        add_rpc_operation(*definitions)
        qname = definitions[0]
        name = definitions[2]
        if qname.name != name and qname.name.capitalize == name.capitalize
          ::SOAP::Mapping.define_singleton_method(self, qname.name) do |*arg|
            __send__(name, *arg)
          end
        end
      end
    end
  end
end