Hello to everyone,

Working for a new company brings a lot of new excitement and also a lot of new stuff to learn; now it’s Rails 3 and Ruby moment… So, because of a project I’m following, I had the need to learn how to get something out of a web service using Ruby… Well, it’s really easy and simple and I want to share with you what I’ve learned.

First of all install a nice gem called Savon using the following command :

     gem install savon

This gem gives you a whole set of methods to call a web service and use its responses.

Open your favourite text editor and start coding this basic usage example:

require "savon"
client = Savon.client("http://www.webservicex.net/globalweather.asmx?WSDL")

As you can see, after telling Ruby that you want to use Savon, you need to istantiate a client passing to Savon client method the WSDL address of the web service you want to use.

After this, lets the client object sends a request to the web service , suppressing the SOAPAction header, since the free web service I’m using in this example, doesn’t need it; setting up a request using a do/end als let’s you set up some nice stuff like the entire envelope you need.

response = client.request "GetCitiesByCountry" do
	http.headers.delete("SOAPAction")
	soap.xml =  "<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/' xmlns:web='http://www.webserviceX.NET'>
			   <soapenv:Header/>
			   <soapenv:Body>
			      <web:GetCitiesByCountry>
				 <!--Optional:-->
				 <web:CountryName>italy</web:CountryName>
			      </web:GetCitiesByCountry>
			   </soapenv:Body>
		    </soapenv:Envelope>"
end

puts response.to_hash

Now try this small example and you will see how powerful Savon is and how many features it has. I will, for sure, study this gem in deep and give you some feedback about it. Up to now here is the reference

Savon

Enjoy and share!!!