Sending complex objects through webservices using ColdFusion

Title: Sending complex objects through webservices using ColdFusion

Using web servies with ColdFusion is pretty simple most of the time, you create a webservice object and then call the methods on that object, for example: <cfset ws = CreateObject("webservice", "http://localhost/someservice/?wsdl")> <cfset aResults = ws.doSearch("find something")>

This is all fine and dandy if you have to pass a simple string or many other things, but what happens if, as I am having to do at the moment, you need to call a method that takes an object as a parameter? Sometimes, looking at the WSDL of the webserive isn’t enough to tell you how to create an object to send to the webservice.

First of, a simple way of creating an object is with a struct, so if you had to send an parameter (lets say, SearchQueryTO) you can create it as follows:

searchQuery = StructNew(); searchQuery.params = "find Something"; searchQuery.resultCount = "10"; //Do a search with the object... results = ws.doSearch(searchQuery);

The searchQuery struct above now gets automagically translated into the SearchQuery object that the webservice requires, all fine so far, but recently I got stuck with trying to pass some data back to a webservice. The WSDL said that it was an array of SearchCriteriaTO’s but no matter what I did (create Arrays etc) it wouldn’t accept it.

In the ColdFusion server, all webservice calls generate java classes or “stubs” using a little Apache Axis library called wsdl2Java (imaginative eh), these stubbs are what you are actually calling from your code to connect to the webservice, since I didn’t know EXACTLY what I had to call, you can do the following:

Zip up the stubbs for your service, they are held in /stubs/ and there will be a "WSxxxxxxx" folder where the x's are a number. Delete them all and make a call to your miscreant webservice to see the folder generated for the stubbs</li>
In Eclipse, create a new Java Project, you wont be doing any actual java but it just will help so that you can import the zipped stub folder
Right click on the project, and select Java Build Path
Click on the Libraries tab and select "Add External Jars..." and select the zip that you created of your stubs and click ok
In your project you should now expand the "Referenced Libraries" node and you will see all the java classes that make up your webservice


	//create the array that we will pass
	ArrayOfSearchCriteriaTO = StructNew();
	ArrayOfSearchCriteriaTO['searchCriteriaTO'] = ArrayNew(1);
	
	//create the objects that we will put into the array
	sc = StructNew();
	sc['attributeName'] = "name";
	sc['stringValue'] = "some value";