calling a webservice without using a wsdl file - actionscript-3

Question

I need to make a call to a webservice and at the moment i am doing it this way:
private var myWebService:WebService = new WebService();
myWebService.loadWSDL('path to wsdl file');
myWebService.addEventListener(ResultEvent.RESULT , function(event:ResultEvent):void {
trace(event);
});
myWebService.addEventListener(FaultEvent.FAULT , function(event:FaultEvent):void {
trace(event);
});
myWebService.soapcallName();
Now i would like to do the same thing but without loading the WSDL file and doing the soapcalls directly to the right url. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Yes, I had to do this when our WS calls had to hit a proxy in a DMZ, but the WSDL for the ACTUAL service was behind a firewall and unreachable. But it is a tricky process.
First you will need to create the soap post requests manually. You can read all about the structure on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP . This means you will need to generate all calls manually since you can't say SomeService.SomeMethod without the wsdl loaded. Now the next problem you will face is actually sending it out. Because you need to add custom http headers on a POST, you will need to build the full request document (strings and line breaks etc) and send it over a socket (HTTPService will not support custom headers on a POST). If you need more help getting this going, I can add further examples on here.
Example:
You need to basically create a method to generate SOAP Envelopes. Here's a quick i.e. from the link I gave you...
private function getStockPrice(symbol:String):String{
// you can do this with xml also and call toString() on it later
var envelope:String = "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>";
envelope += "<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap=\"http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope\">";
envelope += "<soap:Header></soap:Header>";
envelope += "<soap:Body><m:GetStockPrice xmlns:m=\"http://www.example.org/stock\">";
envelope += "<m:StockName>" + symbol + "</m:StockName>";
envelope += "</m:GetStockPrice></soap:Body></soap:Envelope>";
return envelope;
}
Then you call getStockPrice("IBM") which will return the ready to go SOAP envelope that you will use as the POST body of your call. Note that in the example, you will have to know the information that would have been in the WSDL ahead of time like method names, param names etc. Use the Socket() class to send the post body to the server since you will need to add a custom SOAPAction header. If you need help with that part, here is a class to begin hacking on that already does that... use it instead of HTTPService. RestHTTPService.