Consume SOAP webservice in rhoconnect

Rhomobile is cross-platform mobile framework to develop native application. The documentation for developing native app is nice. I recently tried consuming webservice using savon gem in rhoconnect. The most tricky part is to get input from rhodes application and use that as a parameters in rhoconnect webservice call. The gist of things needed for making SOAP call are

* Create a rhodes application
* Pass the input parameters to rhoconnect application
* Make a SOAP request in rhoconnect
* Display the SOAP response in rhodes from rhoconnect

We will use http://www.webservicex.net/length.asmx?WSDL webservice to consume and manipulate response in rhoconnect. Let’s see how to make these things work.
1. Sample Rhodes Application with search action

First we will create a rhodes app with model Unit as shown
[source language=”ruby”]
rhodes app rhodes-unit-webservice
rhodes model Unit value,from,to
[/source]
Enable sync in Model to connect to rhoconnect
[source language=”ruby”]
class Product
enable :sync
end
[/source]
Pass inputs given by user to rhoconnect search action
[source language=”ruby”]
def search
Unit.search(
:from => ‘search’,
:search_params => {
:Value => @params[‘unit’][‘value’],
:From => @params[‘unit’][‘from’],
:To => @params[‘unit’][‘to’]
},
:callback => url_for(:action => :search_callback),
:callback_param => “”
)
render :action => :wait
end
[/source]
We will implement search callback after SOAP request done in rhoconnect. Now let’s see what to do in rhoconenct

2. Rhoconnect Application with SOAP webservice call in search action

We will create a basic rhoconnect application with Unit source adapter as shown
[source language=”ruby”]
rhoconnect app rhoconnect-unit-webservice
rhoconnect source Unit
[/source]
Add savon gem in Gemfile
[source language=”ruby”]
gem ‘savon’
[/source]
Call ChangeLengthUnit method in webservice using savon
[source language=”ruby”]
require ‘savon’
@webservice_url = “http://www.webservicex.net/length.asmx?WSDL”
client = Savon::Client.new(@webservice_url )
data= client.request :change_length_unit do
soap.body = {
“LengthValue” => params[“Value”],
“fromLengthUnit” => params[“From”],
“toLengthUnit” => params[“To”]
}
end
puts data.to_hash
[/source]
Here data.to_hash has the response of webservice called. We will get inputs for this SOAP request from rhodes search action. We can access those params in rhoconnect search action as
[source language=”ruby”]
def search(params)
# params – values from rhodes
end
[/source]
We will assign the response of SOAP call to @result which will in turn stores in redis database as shown
[source language=”ruby”]
puts data.to_hash
@result = data.to_hash
@result
[/source]

3. Display SOAP response from rhoconnect

Now response of SOAP request is stored in redis database. We can access it in search callback in rhodes as
[source language=”ruby”]
def search_callback
status = @params[“status”]
if status == “complete”
data = Unit.find_all
data.each do |val|
Alert.show_popup(“The Converted value is #{val.change_length_unit_result}”)
end
WebView.navigate(url_for :action => :index)
end
end
[/source]
All values stored in rhoconnect can be retrieved through find query. This is how we consume SOAP webservice from rhodes through rhoconnect.

Some of the screenshots taken from Iphone Mobile

I hope this blog will be helpful for making SOAP request in rhomobile. Source code of rhodes and rhoconnect application is available at https://github.com/Dhepthi/rhodes-unit-webservice, https://github.com/Dhepthi/rhoconnect-unit-webservice.Please feel free to improve and send me a pull request. Any suggestion or comments are welcome.