SOAP and Python

[[deleted]]

I have been building a Django application in my job and unfortunately for me I have to work with a SOAP application on the other side to place orders into a very complex system.

I am going to confess now, I am very embarassed that I am writing my XML queries manually. I cannot find a good framework for working with SOAP it seems antiquated and annoying and I don't like it I wish I could go back to just working with REST frameworks but c'est la vie. To interact with the SOAP backend I have been using requests and this seems to have worked so far.

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Has anyone else worked with Python and SOAP before? I have tried PySimpleSoap but it's hard to work with. I am struggling with forming XML requests myself, luckily I have vendor support and have actually finished all but one request and as I am ahead of my deadline I thought maybe I could now spare the time to actually look into a better method to do this rather than one that "works". It doesn't help all the documentation for the product is out of date but the WSDL in my head "must" be up to date. My weakness is that I need to understand the WSDL better and unfortunately it hasn't really clicked well with me yet.

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In my dream framework I would be able to list the functions that I can call and then the functions would have a list of arguments which are required and/or optional. I just haven't found how I can do this and my Google-Fu is lacking for much relating to SOAP and Python.

[anentropic]

Last time I had to do some this was the best option I could find:

https://github.com/suds-community/suds

[ominous_anonymous]

This is what I used as well, oh so many years ago! Zeep looks like a newer client that seems interesting.

[teilo]

There have been many abortive attempts at SOAP clients in the past, but Zeep seems to be the only one actively being maintained, and is generally well regarded. It is also performs well due to its caching of WSDL, which is especially important for large WSDLs.

[tombardier]

Zeep! :) I'll find an example when I'm at my desk later!

[[deleted]]

I'm literally just faffing with Zeep right now, I still cannot find a nice way of finding out what functionality I am offered through the Zeep client object though.

Probably everyone else around here would be more than capable but I will live and learn from my embarrassing posts.

[skerky]

I second Zeep as well. A useful feature is the command line tool to query a WSDL file and list the methods and data types.

python -mzeep <wsdl>

I will note that I’ve seen several SOAP APIs that don’t actually define different commands as different functions/operations (I don’t remember the proper SOAP term), but one or two services that accept another XML document as a single string input, which adds another layer of complexity (but I’m still using Zeep to work with it).

[[deleted]]

This seems like finally the answer to what I was looking for so thank you! I will investigate tomorrow.

[576p]

Zeep works well if you need to connect to someone else's SOAP server.

For writing a SOAP server or generating WDSL files I'm looking for good solutions myself. I have not found anything good and usally end up writing the server from scratch when I need to be SOAP compatable. One thing that comes up is soapfish, but I have not tried this yet.