The .NET web-service should be publishing a WSDL description of what the service expects. Clients of the service need merely translate the WSDL into "proxy" methods of the service.

Even though my script runs with apparently no errors, the other end is saying nothing is coming through.

In the worst case, you can turn on debugging in SOAP::Lite to see what is being sent to and received from the .NET service.

On the perl client side, I absolutely recommend SOAP::WSDL as it does almost all of the hard work for you; you'll get much more meaningful errors before you see the few exceptions to this.

SOAP::WSDL is a sub-class of SOAP::Lite, the module used by the vast majority of perl SOAP clients/services.

-David

Thanks for the pointers, I'll look at SOAP::WSDL. I've discovered that I have to use SOAP::Lite for my 'client' script, and SOAP::Transport::HTTP for the 'server' script. I have debug on, and in my client log get this:

SOAP::Lite::call: ()
SOAP::Serializer::envelope: ()
SOAP::Deserializer::deserialize: ()
SOAP::Parser::decode: ()
which of course helps me tremendously :)

The programmers running the .NET side are telling me that nothing is coming through, so until I get the debugging thing working I'm at their mercy.

I've managed to get some debugging information, but it leaves me no closer to a solution:

mismatched tag at line 61, column 16, byte 2902:
<p>
       </ul>
====^
</span>
at C:/usr/lib/XML/Parser.pm line 187


Of course looking at the Parser module sheds no light on where / how that HTML code is being generated. Line #187:

$result = $expat->parse($arg);

I'm spiralling further away from a solution here and could really use some help.

My code


use SOAP::WSDL +trace => qw(dispatch);
my $soap = SOAP::WSDL->new(wsdl => 'http://xxx.xxx.xxx/somedoc.asmx');
+ # edited
$soap -> wsdlinit();
$soap -> servicename('Web Mechanic');
my $transport = $soap -> call('Insert' => (
Firstname => $FirstName )); # previously defined
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