libzeep(3)

NAME
libzeep - A C++ library for XML parsing, XPath, SOAP servers and web apps

SYNOPSIS
#include <zeep/server.hpp>

class my_server : public zeep::server
{
  public:
    my_server(const char* addr, short port);
    void sum(int a, int b, int& c) { c = a + b; }
};

my_server::my_server(const char* addr, short port)
  : zeep::server("http//www.acme.org/...", addr, port)
{
  const char kSumParameterNames[] = { "a", "b", "c" };
  register_action("sum", this, &my_server::sum, kSumParameterNames);
}

 ...

int main()
{
  my_server server("0.0.0.0", 10333);
  boost::thread t(boost::bind(&my_server::run, &server));
  // and wait for a signal to stop using e.g. sigwait(3)
  ...
}

NOTE
See HTML pages for more up-to-date documentation. E.g. at http://www.cmbi.ru.nl/libzeep/doc

DESCRIPTION
Using libzeep you can create a SOAP server by deriving from zeep::server. In the constructor of your server, you call the base class constructor with three arguments: ns, a namespace for your SOAP server, address, the address to listen to, usually "0.0.0.0" to listen to all available addresses. And port, the port number to bind to.

SOAP actions are simply members of the server object and are registered using the register_action member function of the zeep::server base class. After initializing the server object, the run member is called and the server then starts listening to the address and port specified.

The resulting web service application will process incoming request. There are three kinds of requests, the server can return an automatically generated WSDL, it can process standard SOAP message send in SOAP envelopes and it can handle REST style requests which are mapped to corresponding SOAP messages internally.

The signature of the registered actions are used to generate all the code needed to serialize and deserialize SOAP envelopes and to create a corresponding WSDL file. The signature can be as simple as the example above but can also be as complex as in this one:

void myAction(
const std::vector<MyStructIn>& input,
MyStructOut& output);

In order to make this work, you have to notify the library of the mapping of your structure type to a name using the macro SOAP_XML_SET_STRUCT_NAME like this:

SOAP_XML_SET_STRUCT_NAME(MyStructIn);
SOAP_XML_SET_STRUCT_NAME(MyStructOut);

Next to this, you have to provide a way to serialize and deserialize your structure. For this, libzeep uses the same mechanism as the Boost::serialize library, which means you have to add a templated member function called serialize to your structure. The result will look like this:

struct MyStructIn {
  string myField1;
  int myField2;

  template<class Archive>
  void serialize(Archive& ar, const unsigned int version)
  {
    ar & BOOST_SERIALIZATION_NVP(myField1)
       & BOOST_SERIALIZATION_NVP(myField2);
  }
};

Similarly you can use enum's in an action signature or as structure member variables. Again we need to tell the library the type name for the enum and the possible enum values. We do this using the SOAP_XML_ADD_ENUM macro, like this:

   enum MyEnum { "one", "two" };
   SOAP_XML_ADD_ENUM(myEnum, one);
   SOAP_XML_ADD_ENUM(myEnum, two);

As shown above, you can also use std::vector containers in the signature of actions. Support for other STL containers is not implemented yet.

If the address used by clients of your server is different from the address of your local machine (which can happen if you're behind a reverse proxy e.g.) you can specify the location using the set_location member function of zeep::server. The specified address will then be used in the WSDL file.

BUGS
This documentation is seriously out of date. Look at the HTML version for more up-to-date documentation, you can find it at /usr/share/doc/libzeep-dev/html or at http://www.cmbi.ru.nl/libzeep/ Undoubtedly libzeep will contain bugs. One of the more obvious one is the missing support for signatures using STL containers other than std::vector.