Generating gSoap files

Previously, the SOAP endpoint would be used directly by the wsdl2h command. However, there is a bug in glassfish that prevents certain SOAP data from being transmitted to ICAT correctly, for example, datasets related to a datafile.

The ICAT developers have released a script to address this, which generates a wsdl and xsd file with modified attributes. To generate these files run the script against the endpoint, for example:

$ ./wsdl.sh https://icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk

To generate the source declartion file needed by soapcpp2 you need to run wsdl2h against both the xsd file and the wsdl:

// Note: the "ICATCompat" related commands and files in the ICAT provided script are not required.
$ wsdl2h -qICat4 -o ICat4Service.h ICAT.xsd ICAT.wsdl

The following command will generate classes and headers based on the source file generated above:

$ soapcpp2 -i -x -C -qICat4 -I</path/to/gsoap/import> ICat4Service.h

Possible issues

OSX warnings

When running your code on OSX locally or on test servers you will come across problems with OSX trying to include windows.h files. To solve this issue, locate windows.h in stdsoap2.h and add the following code to the WITH_OPENSSL macro:

# ifdef __APPLE__
  # undef OPENSSL_SYS_WINDOWS
  # undef OPENSSL_SYS_WIN32
# endif

To prevent OSX errors when trying to compile (due to already included files) comment out the following two lines of code inside the second #ifdef __APPLE__ macro:

extern "C" int isnan(double);
extern "C" int isinf(double);

Namespace and linker issues

For namespaces to work correctly three new files were generated from an empty file. This was achieved using the following commands:

touch soapserializers.h
soapcpp2 -psoapserializers soapserializers.h

The generated files contained the default SOAP Header and Fault serialization codes. This was needed as the GSoap library could not access these methods from inside ICat3/4 namespaces.