Lecayla, Ruby and Soap4r

I was tasked with incorporating our system with a 3rd party credit card processing company called Lecayla. Initially this was written using PHP which was extremely easy, but now I needed to do it with Ruby. Lecayla had examples written in PHP but it seemed that no one was using Ruby. This created all kinds of issues all of them dealing with Soap4r. Hopefully this will help some people out there using Lecayla and Ruby and other people who are fighting with getting Ruby and Soap to work together.

• Documentation (or lack there of)

Soap4r is an implementation of Soap 1.1 for Ruby. One of the major problems is the complete lack of documentation. There are documentation entries for all the various classes but there isn’t any sort of explanation as to what does what. The only real way to figure all this stuff out is to use google and search other forums.

• Caching

Soap isn’t very speedy and neither is Ruby. Soap4r doesn’t support caching of the wsdl and xsd files so every time you initialize the driver it will go out and get a new copy of the wsdl. This slows down the system tremendously. I implemented a really basic caching check into my class that solved this problem. I think this should be a part of Soap4r but it isn’t.

t_wsdl = 'config/lecayla.wsdl'
if (! FileTest.exists?('config/lecayla.wsdl')) || (! FileTest.exists?('config/lecayla.xsd'))
File.open('config/lecayla.wsdl', 'w') do |f|
f.write(Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse(billing.wsdl)))
end
File.open('config/lecayla.xsd', 'w') do |f|
f.write(Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse(billing.xsd)))
end
end
This will store the wsdl and xsd files in your config directory for use in your driver setup. If you don’t cache them in some form you will have a huge speed hit.

• Multiple ports in the same wsdl file

In PHP soap you just tell php to use the wsdl and everything just works. It doesn’t matter if the calls you are making are designated within different ports or not. PHP just does its thing and you do yours. With Soap4r it isn’t quite as simple. For Lecayla there are 3 different ports in their wsdl file, ContractHttpPort, MeteringHttpPort, and SSOHttpPort. In your initialization of your class you need to specifically setup each one. I did this:

@contractDriver = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new(t_wsdl).create_rpc_driver(nil,'ContractHttpPort')
@meteringDriver = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new(t_wsdl).create_rpc_driver(nil,'MeteringHttpPort')
@ssoDriver = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new(t_wsdl).create_rpc_driver(nil,'SSOHttpPort')

Now in your class if you for example want to add a user you simply do

@meteringDriver.registerUser(params)

This is another reason to cache your wsdl, otherwise for each of these it would go out and get the wsdl. You can guess as to how long just this process took.

• Data structure formats

For Lecayla the structure of your hashes can be complex for the calls that you need to make, and it isn’t completely clear as to what the format should be for some of them. In PHP this was easy because they provided a sample and it was quick to get it up and running. In Ruby this took a little work figuring out. Soap4r contains a script called wsdl2ruby.rb that takes a wsdl file and outputs a driver file and a script that you can use to test based upon the xsd and wsdl that you give it. I found it a lot easier though to just read the wsdl and xsd files myself. The code generated by wsdl2ruby seemed to be extreme overkill for what I wanted. With some help from the Soap4r maintainer and some sorting out by myself. Here are some of the structure formats.

Also make sure you wrap your calls in begin blocks so you can catch any exceptions that come across. The Lecayla documentation on their web site for developers is extremely helpful for what you will get in return and what the errors mean.

Thats about it. The above should be enough to get you started really quickly with implementing Lecayla in your system. Hopefully this is also some help to those folks out there that have been given a wsdl and don’t know what to do with it in Ruby. There is a Google group for Soap4r that I found useful for asking questions. The maintainer of it actually answers questions which is a lot better than what some other maintainers of Ruby projects do.

Add comment December 7th, 2007 Author: Mike Alletto