To be able to use complex types with Soap requests, they need to be fully defined in the WSDL file. Zend_Soap can automate this process, if you know how to define those complex types. Let us start without it Zend_Soap's magic and compare it with a fully discovered complex request type afterwards.

In their example, they have a collection of books (objects) that they want to send over to the web service. The code for both the server and client side are included with the WSDL automagically created by the Zend_Soap_Server component. By setting docblock comments on the properties of the Book objects, the SOAP components automatically know what types they are. Their example defines these, and sets up the web service on the other side with a classmap to define where the "tags" information for each book lies.

In this article I will introduce you to the Zend_Soap component of the Zend Framework. This component allows you to easily create and consume SOAP web services. We will create a simple web service with several methods using Zend_Soap_Server, and consume the service with Zend_Soap_Client.

They start with a brief look at how SOAP works before moving on to the code - creating the SOAP server code followed by the client. Their simple application takes in age information and returns back a simple, formatted string.

The following example provides you with a working Soap server inside a Zend_Controller_Action, although I discourage the use of it and would suggest using a dedicated script outside the dispatching process to gain multitudes of performance, which webservices often require.

His setup request two routes to be added - one that points "server" to "serverActioin" and the other that points "wsdl" to "wsdlAction".