I'm trying to build a SOAP encoded message to send through a web service as part of a smoke-test to confirm that a web-services layer is functioning properly (It's part of a much larger application, but if this service is broken, we need to know like...yesterday).

I've got just about zero SOAP experience, so working with SOAP::Lite is a bit hazy for me but I've got this to generate the first in a sequence of SOAP encoded messages:

use strict;

use SOAP::Lite;
use HTTP::Cookies;

my $soap = new SOAP::Lite
 ->proxy( 'http://host.domain.com:80',
     cookie_jar => HTTP::Cookies->new( ignore_discard => 1 ) )
 ->readable(1)
;

my $data =
  SOAP::Data->name( 'login' => [
      SOAP::Data->name('user_name' => 'uname')->attr({ xmlns => ''}),
      SOAP::Data->name('password'  => 'upass')->attr({ xmlns => ''}),
    ],
)->attr({ xmlns => 'data.someservice.somedomain' });

my $env = SOAP::Serializer->envelope( freeform => $data );

print $env, "\n";
[download]

My impression from the Looooooong abundant SOAP::Lite docs was that passing a true value to readable would yield formatted XML for...readability. Does this only apply to non-freeform envelopes?