Diving Deeper

I've been diving into the SOAP4R code a little to get a lay of the land and figure out where any MTOM hooks would be possible. BTW, if you haven't checked out the ruby-debug gem, I highly recommend it. Here's a short screencast on basic useage (if you are familiar with gdb, then this is cake).

After running through the code a few times with the debugger, I have a basic sense as to what the wsdl2ruby.rb file is doing (and where it's generating errors). I've been using this document/literal WSDL which includes the SOAP12 schema (just to try out). Given that SOAP4R doesn't have support for SOAP1.2, I didn't really expect this to work - and it doesn't. Keeps bombing out when it is building the definitions:

ignored element: {http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap12/}binding
ignored element: {http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap12/}operation
ignored element: {http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap12/}body
ignored element: {http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap12/}fault
ignored element: {http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap12/}address

Also, wsdl2ruby doesn't seem to like it when the service and definition elements are named the same: it is using the names of the elements to name the files, and runs into a collision when it creates the 'service' library because the definitions library (of the same name) has already been created. I'd be curious if there is anything in the WS-I profile (or WSDL spec for that matter) that prohibits naming the defs and service the same.

The other interesting tidbit is that if I replace the SOAP12 namespace to SOAP and rename the definitions element so that it does not conflict, wsdl2ruby binds fine and generates all the correct code without errors! So, I'm at least working with a WSDL that is bindable, aside from some minor details. However, I would like to keep the SOAP12 refs in there, as MTOM is technically only supported by SOAP12 (although I don't know of any technical issue in the MTOM/XOP spec that would preclude using it with SOAP11).

So, here's my overview of the WSDL2ruby.rb file (the version in lib\ruby\1.8\wsdl\soap, rather than the wrapper version included in the soap4r distribution. I'm running soap4r 1.5.6.

This file does two main things: 1) parses the WSDL using the XSD::XMLparser engine and, 2) dumps the class definitions, type mappings, and client/server stub code (including the driver and servant) into files. The WSDL parsing is the interesting part, and where it keeps barfing. Specifically, when trying to import the 'binding' element, it compares the imported element name with the the DefinitionsName variable and throws an unknown element error (line 115 of lib/ruby/1.8/wsdl/parser.rb). The value of DefinitionsName is 'definitions' which is obviously not 'binding'. Next up is figuring out where DefinitionsName comes from, or is defined, and what it means.