From: tsuraan <tsuraan@...>
Date: 2005-04-16T11:20:51+09:00
Subject: Re: soap4r and nws.noaa.gov (moving from ruby-core)

>> Has anyone used soap4r with the US weather service's soap server?  I'm
>> having trouble figuring out how the array that the service uses should
>> map into ruby.  I've tried using wsdl2ruby to convert the wsdl
>> automatically to a ruby class, but that doesn't even work.  Also, if
>> this is the wrong place to be asking this (probably...), could someone
>> point me in the right direction?  Thanks.
>
> Here's a sample client;
> http://dev.ctor.org/soap4r/file/trunk/sample/wsdl/noaa/client.rb
> The sample requires the latest snapshot tarball of soap4r at
> http://dev.ctor.org/download/
>
> I don't know this service well.  The sample clients above seem to 
> access
> the service correctly, but I don't know the response is right or not.
>  Would somebody please check this sample and let me know it works
> correctly?

The problem that I had was when I set various elements to false, the 
server would still send me all the data that it could.  It's not really 
a problem, since ignoring unwanted data isn't painful, but it's 
annoying.  I'd try the client out, but I'm waiting on a new motherboard 
for my dev machine.

>  I cannot understand the response XML. (What is dwml?)  This
> service seems to be somewhat popular...
>
> Is there a XML Schema of this dwml thing?  I might be able to map a
> response XML to Ruby object graph using XML Schema support of soap4r,
> like I once did for Yahoo's Search Web Services at
> http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/132666

A somewhat useful description of the XML response can be found at 
http://weather.gov/mdl/XML/Design/MDL_XML_Design.pdf .  I had something 
better, but I'm not sure where it is.  A document containing the "NDFD 
XML Schema" is 
http://products.weather.gov/PDD/Extensible_Markup_Language.pdf (See 
appendix B), but I didn't find that to be very useful.  Basically, if 
you understand the keys it's pretty easy to convert the XML response 
into something usable.  I had it almost working, but then my 
motherboard flaked out and killed everything on my hard drive.  Stupid 
computers...

--jay