Web Services and Nested Complex Types

Question

I am having troubles trying to get coldfusion to use a web
service function.
I know that the web service works as I am sending another
function in a simple variable and receiving a simple variable. I
know the function exists as I when I dump the object the function
is there and I have been told by who supplies it that it works in
other languages.
The problem I am having is that when I call the function I
get the following error: Web service operation "[function name]"
with parameters [parameters] could not be found. I am lead to
believe that it may have to do with the fact that one of the
parameters is a complex type with nested complex types, because of
the amount of trouble it took to get nested complex types to
(apparently) work.
Has anyone had this problem before and/or know how to fix
it?

Answer 1

You can invoke methods which take complextypes as parameters.
The idea is to create first a structure which represents the
complextype. For example; crit = structNew(), crit.paramname1 =
value1, ctir.paramname2 = value2. After this, you just pass the
structure
crit as a parameter value, for example with
<cfinvokeargument>.
Always check the wsdl and the possible documentation
carefully. You'll get always an error if the types of the
parameters passed didn't match exactly to what was expected.
Handling complextype responses is also possible, but not very
elegant with ColdFusion.
For example, you have <cfinvoke
returnvariable="wsResult"... >, and you get a java object as a
response which you can really do nothing about with CF functions,
you must use Java Reflection API to extract the values.
<cfset oFields =
wsresult.getClass().getDeclaredFields()>
<cfoutput>
<cfloop from="1" to="#arraylen(oFields)#" index="fi">
<cfset field = oFields[fi].getName()>
<cfif isdefined("wsresult." & field) AND field NEQ
"typedesc">
#field# = #wsResult[field]#<br>
</cfif>
</cfloop>
</cfoutput>
The above is just an example, and It might work with only
some types of complextype responses. But it's a start. :)
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00553.html
is also another example about handling complextype responses. It
plays "safer", not relying that CF can extract values without
"getters" automatically, and is more of a complete solution.