Q: How to call and parse SOAP WSDL service in Swift 2.0 at Xcode 7.1

Hello ColayHills,

That is because SOAP is outdated. It is based on XML, and really nasty XML at that. Do you have other options or do you have to use SOAP?

If you do need to use SOAP and if you only need to send and receive a few fairly simple/fixed SOAP xml structures, then you may be able to get away with not using an actual SOAP encoder/decoder.

Instead you could look at samples of the xml structures (if available) or you could look at what some kind of SOAP (demo) tool sends/receives over the wire. With this knowledge you could then create the proper xml messages using a regular format string with a few input parameters. You could similarly use regular expressions to parse out the data fields form the reply SOAP messages.

Hello again ColayHills,

I'm afraid there is nothing simple about the Simple Object Access Protocol. Here is a SOAP client on github that still seems to be maintained. It even has Swift examples. https://github.com/priore/SOAPEngine

Are you trying to do this from iOS? From a Mac, I would suggest using some 3rd party/open-source solution and calling it as an external task. For iOS, you're just SOL. You can write it yourself using the above library, NSURLConnection or NSURLSession. The library will handle the parsing for you but you will have to learn how the delegates work. I'm sure there are other libraries too, they will just be in Objective-C, which you can use with Swift. They may be pretty old though. Plus, if you are dealing with large scale projects, they might even use funky things like WSDL. That's gonna be a mess.

Hello again ColayHills,

Sorry. I didn't see that license. That's odd for github.

I'm afraid you have a fundamental problem here. SOAP is horribly difficult. Not just hard - exceptionally hard. Plus, there is no guarantee that any particular SOAP protocol is going to map well onto an asynchronous network architecture. I haven't used SOAP in years so I can't give you any coding help. You are not going to find anything in Swift. You can find some libraries in C (http://csoap.sourceforge.net/), some in Objective-C (https://code.google.com/p/wsdl2objc/), and some generators (http://sudzc.com/). The last time I use a native SOAP client I used EasySOAP (http://easysoap.sourceforge.net/). It is very easy but the C++ is positively ancient.

Unless someone is paying you, handsomely, by the hour, I strongly suggest that you do not attempt to write your own. You can use any Objective-C or C library out there from your Swift code. Most libraries should have an option of feeding in an XML text string. You can do your networking in NSURLSession or whatever you want and then just give the library the XML. It won't be pretty.

But I want to reiterate that unless you are being paid very well - at least 200k a year - don't walk away from SOAP - run. It is career suicide.

You can get help from one of this

http://webindream.com/soap-with-swift/

https://gist.github.com/dethbiscuit/af50baf888ed25479644

Hello ColayHills. I'm the author of http://webindream.com/soap-with-swift/

I've modified my article to make it compatible with Swift 2.1.1

If you haven't find any solution yet, please check it again.

You may try http://webindream.com/soap-with-swift/

I've modified this article to make it compatible with Swift 2.1.1