Rails - Jul 2006 - Session management with SOAP and AWS

I''m working on a rails app where I''d like to have a
session-based
SOAP API.  That is, I''d like to connect via SSL and have a
''login''
method followed by one or more other methods.

   I''m using the ActionWebService::Client::Soap class to connect to  
my app, but each method invocation results in a new session on the  
server (WEBrick, at the moment).  I''ve tracked down an example at  
<http://www.zimbra.com/forums/showthread.php?t=428> of how I might  
add a session id cookie header via some direct access to the SOAP  
driver.  But, @driver isn''t exposed in  
ActionWebService::Client::Soap, so I can''t get at it.

   Is there a simpler way to do this?  I could use the Ruby SOAP API  
directly, but then I''d not get the advantage of using the API object  
to do the method creation on the driver.

   Thanks!

-tim

On Jul 18, 2006, at 11:35 PM, Timothy J.Wood wrote:
>
>   I''m working on a rails app where I''d like to have a
session-based
> SOAP API.  That is, I''d like to connect via SSL and have a
''login''
> method followed by one or more other methods.
>
>   I''m using the ActionWebService::Client::Soap class to connect to
> my app, but each method invocation results in a new session on the  
> server (WEBrick, at the moment).  I''ve tracked down an example at
> <http://www.zimbra.com/forums/showthread.php?t=428> of how I might  
> add a session id cookie header via some direct access to the SOAP  
> driver.  But, @driver isn''t exposed in  
> ActionWebService::Client::Soap, so I can''t get at it.
>
>   Is there a simpler way to do this?  I could use the Ruby SOAP API  
> directly, but then I''d not get the advantage of using the API  
> object to do the method creation on the driver.
   To answer my own question and to make sure it gets into google for  
others... :)

   I now use vanilla Ruby SOAP instead of the AWS wrapper and create  
using the WSDL driver (which parses the .wsdl file automatically  
vended by the app):

	BASE_URL = "http://0.0.0.0:3000/xxx"
	soap = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new("#{BASE_URL}/ 
service.wsdl").create_rpc_driver

   Then, I can do a login.  My login method returns the session id  
which I record in a global for the moment:

	SESSION_ID = soap.Login("some user name", "some password")

   To get the _session_id cookie passed back to the app, I do:

	client = soap.proxy.streamhandler.client
	OLD_METHOD = client.method(:post)
	class << client
	  def post(url, req_body, header = {})
	    if header
	      header = header.dup
	    else
	      header = {}
	    end
	    header["Cookie"] = "_session_id=#{SESSION_ID}"
	    OLD_METHOD.call(url, req_body, header)
	  end
	end

   I can then call the rest of the methods in my API using the same  
session identifier.  This is kind of gross, but it seems to work so  
far.  It would be nicer if I could get at the cookies returned from  
the last SOAP message (so the login call wouldn''t need to return the  
session id and could just return true/false).  Also, it would be  
nicer if I could figure out a way to write the instance-specific  
override of :post so that I didn''t use globals (maybe with a block).

-tim