perl's SOAP::Lite - turn off c-gensym and s-gensym

I've been using perl to provide soap/wsdl services or be a soap client for a few years now. The SOAP::Lite package is truly a godsend for making soap easy.

However, I constantly run into one problem that I seem to need to resolve very few months. I'm documenting it here.

SOAP::Lite enjoys putting c-gensym/s-gensym tags around the arguments of my soap method and method response. generally perl figures out what I want when I'm using perl on both the server and client side. However when I have to conform to a standard or operate cross languages, these gensym tags cause problems.

Most frequently I have a hashref I want to return. I want the XML to look like this:

  <element_1>
    <value>a</value>
  </element_1>
  <element_2>
    <value>b</value>
  </element_2>

So my hashref looks like this:

$hash->{element_1}->{value} = a
$hash->{element_b}->{value} = b

But to create that XML, SOAP::Lite is looking for an array, and in particular an array of SOAP::DATA elements with name/value pairs of 'element_1' ↔ {value ⇒ 'a'} and 'element_2' ↔ {value ⇒ 'b'}.

It's easy to make the proper value using map and SOAP::Lite. Simply do this:

 $send_this = SOAP::Data->value(
      map 
         { SOAP::Data->name( $_ => $hash->{$_}) } 
         keys(%{$hash})
 );

Basically, this pulls each top-level hash element from $hash, turns the element into a SOAP::Data() name/value pair, pushes onto an array, and then SOAP:Data()'s that final result.

The result is suitable for sending to SOAP::Lite and getting a SOAP method body that looks as desired.

If your hashref is deeper than this example, no problem. SOAP::Lite handles that correctly. Only the top-level elements need to be converted to these SOAP::Data() name/value pairs. The hashrefs inside them translate to XML properly without further user intervention.