[Solar-talk] Web Services

[Paul M Jones]

On Oct 2, 2006, at 7:31 AM, Michael Caplan wrote:

> Perhaps this is related to the thread from this weakened on nested  
> controllers, but I am looking for a way to integrate web services  
> (xml-rpc primarily) as an interface that is callable by  
> application.  Architecturally, I am wondering how I can best  
> leverage Solar to integrate this.  Anyone have any pointers?

With the disclaimer that I have not actually done this, I can think  
of one way offhand.

Add an actionXmlrpc() method to your page controllers, then use the  
_forward() method to perform the related actions, and finally switch  
to an XML-RPC view/layout combination instead of the web-browser  
combination.  This is sort of REST-ish, but I think the idea is  
applicable:

     public function actionXmlrpc()
     {
         // get all params passed into the method
         $params = func_get_args();

         // find the "real" action based on the first param
         $action = array_shift($params);

         // forward to the "real" action with remaining params
         $this->_forward($action, $params);

         // $this is now populated with all the data from the action.
         // reset the view and layout for xml-rpc output.
         $this->_view = "xmlrpc/" . $action;
         $this->_layout = "xmlrpc";

         // done!
     }

Given a "docs" controller and a "read" action like this URL indicates...

     http://example.com/index.php/docs/read/HomePage

... you would get the XML-RPC version with a URL like this:

     http://example.com/index.php/xmlrpc/docs/read/HomePage

With the above code example, you need View/xmlrpc/*.php for each  
action exposed via XML-RPC, and a Layouts/xmlrpc.php file for the  
layout wrapping the view.

Of course, this is a very naive example.  If you have XML-RPC usage  
in mind, probably best to either design your public properties for  
dual use (data-view and browser-page view), or create a special  
$xmlrpc property and populate it properly in each "normal" action, or  
have the actionXmlrpc() method look at all $this properties and  
format them properly, or some other technique that I haven't thought of.

Hope this begins to help; as I said, it's very much an off-the-cuff  
first pass at the problem.


--

Paul M. Jones  <http://paul-m-jones.com>

Solar: Simple Object Library and Application Repository
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