I spent a day this past week visiting one of our Technology Partners in New Jersey. The objective was do put together a proof concept for some integration we are planning.
We have some very cool stuff, about to be announced at one of the big shows coming up and the integration is around this new stuff. Anyway one of the things we had to do was to connect to a Web Service that returned complex types from a dynamic language.
I chose VBScript as the language because it’s widely available and can be executed on virtually any windows machine. I also wanted to ensure we only used commonly available (installed) ActiveX objects. The other constraint was the Web Services only used SOAP and HTTP POSTs, no HTTP GET support.
So the work involved was to :
- Create an XMLHTTP object
- Create the SOAP Body
- Send it to the Web Service
- Parse the results
Below is how we went about it.
It is messy and pretty horrible text manipulation to generate the SOAP bodies etc, but it is the only way I found from scripting..
Let me know if you have better / easier methods…
Const URL = "http://www.domain.com/folder/service.asmx" Const nsUrl = "http://www.domain.com/namespace-name" ' Create the http request text Dim strSoapReq strSoapReq = GenerateSoapBodyStart() strSoapReq = strSoapReq + GenerateSoapFunctionCallStart("WebServiceFunctionName") strSoapReq = strSoapReq + GenerateSoapParameter("paramName1", paramValue1) strSoapReq = strSoapReq + GenerateSoapParameter("paramName2", paramValue2) strSoapReq = strSoapReq + GenerateSoapFunctionCallEnd("WebServiceFunctionName") strSoapReq = strSoapReq + GenerateSoapBodyEnd() Dim oHttp Dim strResult Set oHttp = CreateObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP") oHttp.open "POST", URL, false oHttp.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "text/xml" oHttp.setRequestHeader "SOAPAction", URL + "WebServiceFunctionName" oHttp.send strSoapReq strResult = oHttp.responseText ' parse XML in strResult Function GetResult(byval responseText, byval resultParam) Dim oXml Set oXml = CreateObject("Msxml2.DOMDocument") oXml.Async = true oXml.LoadXml responseText Dim strPath strPath = "/*/*/*/" + resultParam Dim oNode Set oNode = oXml.documentElement.SelectSingleNode(strPath) GetResult = oNode.Text End Function Function GenerateSoapBodyStart() Dim strSoap strSoap = "<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""utf-8""?>" strSoap = strSoap + "<soap12:Envelope " strSoap = strSoap + "xmlns:xsi=""http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"" " strSoap = strSoap + "xmlns:xsd=""http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"" " strSoap = strSoap + "xmlns:soap12=""http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope""> " strSoap = strSoap + "<soap12:Body>" GenerateSoapBodyStart = strSoap End Function Function GenerateSoapBodyEnd() Dim strSoap strSoap = "</soap12:Body>" strSoap = strSoap + "</soap12:Envelope>" GenerateSoapBodyEnd = strSoap End Function Function GenerateSoapFunctionCallStart(byval strFunction) Dim strSoap strSoap = "<" + strFunction + " xmlns=""" + nsUrl + """>" GenerateSoapFunctionCallStart = strSoap End Function Function GenerateSoapFunctionCallEnd(byval strFunction) Dim strSoap strSoap = "</" + strFunction + ">" GenerateSoapFunctionCallEnd = strSoap End Function Function GenerateSoapParameter(byval strParam, byval strValue) Dim strSoap strSoap = "<" + strParam + ">" strSoap = strSoap + strValue strSoap = strSoap + "</" + strParam + ">" GenerateSoapParameter = strSoap End Function
Hi,
Thanks very much for this, I have been banging my head for something this. Probably this shows my too much dependency on visual studio….
Cheers,
Donnel
Ditto. Thanks.
Hi,
Great code but having some issues with parsing the response. I think it is due to namespace.
I sent an email to your MSN account because this comment facility wouldn’t let me pass in the xml I wanted to show you.
Can you please provide some recommendations.
Thanks,
Michael
Hi,
Nice script. Thanks. I have a quick query. My soap request gives response like below:
ALREADY REGISTERED
How to extract the return (response) alone from this xml?
Thanks in advance,
Naidu
I’m trying to use this in an excel macro, and I get a runtime error when I get to:
oHttp.send strSoapReq
I get an error:
“Run-time error ‘-2146697208 (800c0008)’:
The download of the specified resource has failed.”
Any idea why?