SOAP::Lite is kind of... well, it's not so great in it's present state. I highly recommend checking out XML::Compile::SOAP. It is trivial to compile a WSDL (remote or stored locally for speed bump) and run SOAP requests from the operations it exposes. I've only used it to play around (as a model with Catalyst) but I was very impressed and the author is quite receptive to constructive feedback.

how about an example for http://searchapi2.dialog.com/axis/DialogSearch.wsdl?

Give this a spin. (I was wrong, you have to provide the file/XML, it won't do remote requests natively -- I think the Catalyst Model module does). You should be able to see what's going on and check the docs (and dive the dump info or the published human API if there is one) for how to make calls.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Terse = 1;

use XML::Compile::WSDL11;

use LWP::Simple;
# use XML::LibXML; # might want this

my $uri    = shift || die "Give a WSDL URI!\n";
my $wsdl   = LWP::Simple::get($uri) || die "Couldn't get $uri";

my $schema = XML::Compile::WSDL11->new($wsdl);

print Dumper($schema), "\n";

print "OPERATIONS_______________________________\n";

for my $op ( sort { $a->{operation} cmp $b->{operation} }
             $schema->operations )
{
    print "\t", $op->{operation}, "\n";
}
[download]

(update, added sort)

Thanks, checking it out

In your XML on the data types is declared to be 'SessionStruct'. There are a couple of default types that come with XML; string and integers to name two.

SOAP::Lite comes with its own default parser, and this parser attempts to take your XML file and make it into a Hash. The problem is that it reads the type from the XML document and then calls a module to decode the data type for that XML element. When you have custom types, it does not know what to do and blows up.

XML has some definition documents that help to identify and support these custom formats. The problem for SOAP::Lite is that it does not know how to read these definition documents. Java had alot more work put into it than Perl and so its SOAP utilities can read these definition documents and can handle stuff like this.

What I ended up do is using SOAP::Lite to get the document and don't attempt to deserialize the document. Instead I used XML::Twig to parse my XML.

Hope that helps

Thanks for your answer

Unfortunately the problem is not parsing the XML, but sending it. I don't get any XML back which I can parse. I think the XML is sent (I can see it in debug mode), but on the Server side it is not received correctly (can't deserialize). The question is whether this is a problem with SOAP::Lite or with the XML created by SOAP::Lite?

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
my ($soap,$data,$result,$session);
use SOAP::Lite+trace=> 'debug';
{
  ##Connecting to the SOAP API
  $soap = SOAP::Lite->new(
              'proxy' =>('http://searchapi2.dialog.com/axis/services/D
+ialogSearchPort'),
             );
  $soap->default_ns('urn:DialogSearch');

  $data = SOAP::Data
    ->name('Session'=>\SOAP::Data->value(
                     SOAP::Data->name(Account=>'account')->type(''),
                     SOAP::Data->name(Password=>'pass')->type(''),
                     SOAP::Data->name(State=>'START_SESSION')->type(''
+),
                     SOAP::Data->name(Cost=>0)->type(''),
                     SOAP::Data->name(Atomic=>'True')->type(''),
                     SOAP::Data->name(Interrupt=>'False')->type(''),
                     SOAP::Data->name(ProcessId=>'')->type(''),
                    ),
      );
  $result = $soap->Version($data);
}
[download]

 <ErrorMessage xsi:type="xsd:string">Invalid user id = account</ErrorM
+essage>
[download]