Node.js: how to consume SOAP XML web service

You don't have that many options.

You'll probably want to use one of:

• node-soap
• strong-soap (rewrite of node-soap)
• easysoap

I think that an alternative would be to:

• use a tool such as SoapUI (http://www.soapui.org) to record input and output xml messages
• use node request (https://github.com/mikeal/request) to form input xml message to send (POST) the request to the web service (note that standard javascript templating mechanisms such as ejs (http://embeddedjs.com/) or mustache (https://github.com/janl/mustache.js) could help you here) and finally
• use an XML parser to deserialize response data to JavaScript objects

Yes, this is a rather dirty and low level approach but it should work without problems

If node-soap doesn't work for you, just use node request module and then convert the xml to json if needed.

My request wasn't working with node-soap and there is no support for that module beyond the paid support, which was beyond my resources. So i did the following:

1. downloaded SoapUI on my Linux machine.
2. copied the WSDL xml to a local file
   curl http://192.168.0.28:10005/MainService/WindowsService?wsdl > wsdl_file.xml
3. In SoapUI I went to File > New Soap project and uploaded my wsdl_file.xml.
4. In the navigator i expanded one of the services and right clicked the request and clicked on Show Request Editor.

From there I could send a request and make sure it worked and I could also use the Raw or HTML data to help me build an external request.

Raw from SoapUI for my request

POST http://192.168.0.28:10005/MainService/WindowsService HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
SOAPAction: "http://Main.Service/AUserService/GetUsers"
Content-Length: 303
Host: 192.168.0.28:10005
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/4.1.1 (java 1.5)

XML from SoapUI

<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:qtre="http://Main.Service">
   <soapenv:Header/>
   <soapenv:Body>
      <qtre:GetUsers>
         <qtre:sSearchText></qtre:sSearchText>
      </qtre:GetUsers>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope> 

I used the above to build the following node request:

var request = require('request');
let xml =
`<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:qtre="http://Main.Service">
   <soapenv:Header/>
   <soapenv:Body>
      <qtre:GetUsers>
         <qtre:sSearchText></qtre:sSearchText>
      </qtre:GetUsers>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>`

var options = {
  url: 'http://192.168.0.28:10005/MainService/WindowsService?wsdl',
  method: 'POST',
  body: xml,
  headers: {
    'Content-Type':'text/xml;charset=utf-8',
    'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip,deflate',
    'Content-Length':xml.length,
    'SOAPAction':"http://Main.Service/AUserService/GetUsers"
  }
};

let callback = (error, response, body) => {
  if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
    console.log('Raw result', body);
    var xml2js = require('xml2js');
    var parser = new xml2js.Parser({explicitArray: false, trim: true});
    parser.parseString(body, (err, result) => {
      console.log('JSON result', result);
    });
  };
  console.log('E', response.statusCode, response.statusMessage);  
};
request(options, callback);