Using perl with the HTTP POST method to exchange XML with the Auth service

Question

Has anyone written a perl script to do this yet?
I've been trying all day and keep getting "Content is not allowed in prolog.
I've used the example xml from the docs
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<AuthContext version="1.0">
<Request authIdentifier="0">
<NewAuthContext orgName="dc=exampleorg,dc=com">
</NewAuthContext>
</Request>
</AuthContext>
Then I read the python post at http://swforum.sun.com/jive/thread.jspa?forumID=79&threadID=22370
and the error changed to Premature end of file.
this is the portion of perl that is getting the error:
use strict;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request::Common;
my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new(agent => 'xml client');
my $greeting = <<GREETING;
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<RequestSet vers="1.0" svcid="auth" reqid="1">
     <Request>
     <![CDATA[<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
     <AuthContext version="1.0">
          <Request authIdentifier="0">
               <NewAuthContext orgName="dc=belo,dc=com">
               </NewAuthContext>
          </Request>
     </AuthContext>]]></Request>
</RequestSet>
GREETING
my $response = $browser->request(POST 'http://idpoc1.test.belo.com/amserver/authservice',
                    Content_Type => 'text/xml',
                    Content     => [xmlRequest => $greeting]
print $response->error_as_HTML unless $response->is_success;

Answer 1

Your problem seems to lie in the build of the request. Here you use the "sample=$data" which will invalidate the XML itself. I've tested your code changing only the build of the Request and this works fine! Given an XML like this :
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<data>
     <txnInfo sourcePartnerCode="6" txnDate="2005.09.08"/>
     <unitOfWorkInfo sourceTicketID="SourceTicket_1" diaryEntry="Diray_1" Status="Status_OK"/>
</data>
The Server Stub should look like this :
#!/usr/bin/perl
use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
print qq{Content-type: text/xml\n\n};
if($ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} eq "GET"){
     $my_data = $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'};
     print "jfghdsfjghsdg$my_data";
} else {
     $data_length = $ENV{'CONTENT_LENGTH'};
     $bytes_read = read(STDIN, $my_data, $data_length);
     print "$bytes_read, $my_data";
     $xml = new XML::Simple (KeyAttr=>[]);
     print "have passed XML::Simple creation\n";
     $data = $xml->XMLin("$my_data");
     print "i want to be here \n";
     $transcode=$data->{txnInfo}->{sourcePartnerCode};
     #print "$data->{txnInfo}->{sourcePartnerCode}";
     print $transcode;
     CASE: {
          ($transcode==6) && do {
               print "i am here";
               $lstmoddat=$data->{txnInfo}->{txnDate};
               $srctktid=$data->{unitOfWorkInfo}->{sourceTicketID};
               $actvtylogdesc=$data->{unitOfWorkInfo}->{diaryEntry};
               $status=$data->{unitOfWorkInfo}->{Status};
               $command='bop_cmd -f update1.frg "upd_stats("""Administrator""","""'.$srctktid.'""","""FIP""","""what is this???""")"';
               print "$lstmoddat $srctktid $status \n";
               print "$command";
               system("$command");
               print "i am done";
               last CASE;
And the client stub should look like this :
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;
use IO;
#use XML::Writer;
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new(env_proxy => 1, keep_alive => 1, timeout => 30, );
open INPUT, "<AcceptIncident.xml";
my @greeting = <INPUT>; #-- Read file containing XML struct to send
print "Hello World\n";
my $data_to_send; #-- And build a string of it
foreach my $newItem (@greeting) {
     $data_to_send = "$data_to_send$newItem";
print "Sending \n";
my $head = HTTP::Headers->new(Content_Type => "text/xml", "ID" => "sample");
my $req = HTTP::Request->new('POST', 'http://matrix/cgi-bin/test1.pl', $head, "$data_to_send");
my $response = $ua->request($req);
print $response->as_string; Also you should make sure you have both HTTP::Request amd XML::Simple installed, orelse this will not work.
Hope this is of some help to you.