SOAP-ERROR: Encoding: Violation of encoding rules?

Question

Guys, I'm stuck, banging my head off the desk for the past few hours.

I am trying to consume a service, and I have 8 other functions that I call that are almost IDENTICAL in nature to this one, but this one, results in a 'SOAP-ERROR: Encoding: Violation of encoding rules' error.

Heres the function call (wsdl omitted for security):

    function CanLoadProduct($data){

    $client = new SoapClient('wsdl-url');

    $params = array('username'   => $this->username,
                    'password'  => $this->password,
                    'prod'      => $data['productid'],
                    'mdn'       => $data['mdn']);

    try {
        $reply = $client->__soapCall("CanLoadProduct", $params);
    } catch (Exception $e) {
        echo 'Error: ',  $e->getMessage(), "\n";
        print_r($params);
        die();
    }

    if( $reply['result'] == 1 ){
        return TRUE;        // 1 = true
    } else {
        return FALSE;
    }

}

Ok so this function, connects to a webservice, the required elements are: username, password, prod, mdn, all 4 of which I supply as part of the $params array. Username/Pass are defined earlier, and do work fine, as the other 8 functions consume the web service without any problems.

The $data[] array (that I pass to the function), contains: $data['productid'] $data['mdn'] nothing else is used.

I am getting

SOAP-ERROR: Encoding: Violation of encoding rules

for some unexplained reason, and Googling this error gets me nowhere. Anyone else run into this? Running PHP 5.2.9-2. The strange thing is this is identical to this function which works 100%:

    function GetPIN($productid){

    $client = new SoapClient('wsdl-url');

    $params = array('username'  => $this->username,
                    'password'  => $this->password,
                    'prod'      => $productid);

    try {
        $reply = $client->__soapCall("GetPIN", $params);
    } catch (Exception $e) {
        echo 'Error: ',  $e->getMessage(), "\n";
        die();
    }
        return $reply;
}

Here is the WSDL (should have posted this first):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<definitions xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" 
    xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" 
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
    xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" 
    xmlns:tns="ready:test" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/" 
    xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" 
    xmlns="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" targetNamespace="ready:test">
<types>
<xsd:schema targetNamespace="ready:test"
>
 <xsd:import namespace="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" />
 <xsd:import namespace="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" />
</xsd:schema>
</types>
<message name="CanLoadProductRequest">
  <part name="username" type="xsd:string" />
  <part name="password" type="xsd:string" />
  <part name="prod" type="xsd:string" />    
  <part name="mdn" type="xsd:string" />
  <part name="esn" type="xsd:string" /></message>
<message name="CanLoadProductResponse">
  <part name="result" type="xsd:int" /></message>
<portType name="CanLoadProductPortType">
  <operation name="CanLoadProduct">
    <input message="tns:CanLoadProductRequest"/>
    <output message="tns:CanLoadProductResponse"/>
  </operation>
</portType>

<binding name="CanLoadProductBinding" type="tns:CanLoadProductPortType">
  <soap:binding style="rpc" transport="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http"/>
  <operation name="CanLoadProduct">
    <soap:operation soapAction="{url-removed}" style="rpc"/>
    <input>
        <soap:body use="encoded" namespace="" 
           encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"/>
    </input>
    <output>
        <soap:body use="encoded" namespace="" 
            encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"/>
    </output>
  </operation>
</binding>
<service name="CanLoadProduct">
  <port name="CanLoadProductPort" binding="tns:CanLoadProductBinding">

    <soap:address location="{url-removed}"/>
  </port>
</service>
</definitions>

Answer 1

If you upgrade your PHP version to 7.3 or later, the previous WSDL cache may stop working.

The default install directory is /tmp and disabling cache or deleting the wsdl* cache files should remove the problem. I would recommend clearing the cache, or else your server will pull the WSDL every time (which may not be desirable).

Answer 2

I had the same problem.

In soapUI preferences I checked the option Preferences → Editor Settings → Validate Responses and I received this information:

line 3027: Invalid decimal value: unexpected char '44'.

This solved my problem. Field contained wrong type value.

Answer 3

It looks like you have a type mismatch somewhere, either while assembling your request (one of the parameters is not of type string), or the server returns something other than an int (violating the WSDL response definition and thus causing the client to consider the response invalid, as it expects something else).

• To test the first case, ensure casting all parameters to string first
• To test the second case, create your SoapClient with the trace option set to true in order to gain access to the actual XML answer from the server via $client->__getLastResponse() afterwards (You can use this for request debugging also via __getLastRequest()).

Some additional observations/questions:

• According to the posted WSDL, the 'CanLoadProductRequest' has a fifth param 'esn', which you do not supply in your function call.
• Any reason why you use $client->__soapCall("CanLoadProduct", $params) instead of $client->CanLoadProduct($username, $password, etc.)? (The first version is a lower level variation which is intended to be used for non_WSDL scenarios. The second version might give you a more detailed error/exception)
• Can you test the SOAP Call to CanLoadProductRequest by some other means? The error could be on the server side, trying to return a result type that does not fit the WSDL definition.

Answer 4

I had the same problem when trying to pass XML as a parameter to one of my webservices. Wrapping the XML data in <![CDATA[ ... ]]> got rid of the SOAP-ERROR: Encoding: Violation of encoding rules and everything worked fine.

Other details:
1. The parameter was defined as xsd:string as well.
2. WSDL was document/literal.
3. Using built in SOAP class with php 5.2.10.