How to receive xml requests and send response xml in php?

Question

So I need to build an application that will receive xml request and based on that I will have to return the response xml. I know how to send requests and receive the response, but I have never done it the other way. I would send the request like so:

private function sendRequest($requestXML)
{
    $server = 'http://www.something.com/myapp';
    $headers = array(
    "Content-type: text/xml"
    ,"Content-length: ".strlen($requestXML)
    ,"Connection: close"
    );

    $ch = curl_init(); 
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $server);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 100);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $requestXML);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
    $data = curl_exec($ch);



    if(curl_errno($ch)){
        print curl_error($ch);
        echo "  something went wrong..... try later";
    }else{
        curl_close($ch);
    }

    return $data;

}

My question is - what would be the code on the receiving side? How do I catch the incoming request? Thanks.

Answer 1

The general idea is to read in the POST value, parse it as XML, make a business decision on it, build out an XML response according to the API you've decided on, and write it into the response.

Read in the POST value:

$dataPOST = trim(file_get_contents('php://input'));

Parse as XML:

$xmlData = simplexml_load_string($dataPOST);

Then, you would build out an XML string (or document tree, if you wish), and print it out to the response. print() or echo() will do fine.

Answer 2

All you have to do on the receiving end is create a 'normal' PHP script. Depending on the protocol between your endpoint and the requesting service you need to grab the data from the correct location which is most likely going to be a $_GET or $_POST array.

You may have to read the raw POST data if it's not coming through in $_POST, take a peak at this article

http://www.codediesel.com/php/reading-raw-post-data-in-php/