I got a message from a friend who was struggling to do an integration piece with the Magento eCommerce Platform using the SOAP endpoint available at http://yourserver.co.uk/api/v2_soap?wsdl.
He brought an interesting problem to me, namely that the WCF svcutil executable (and built in Visual Studio 2008) was failing to generate any proxy code when supplied with a seemingly valid wsdl.
I did a quick test and managed to instantly reproduce the error.
Weirder still, when using the “old” .Net 2.0 add web reference method rather than the .Net 3.0+ “Add Service Reference”, the framework managed to create a non-WCF reference just fine.
Dropping down to the command line I saw some unusual messages being displayed by svcutil.exe:
c:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin>SvcUtil.exe http://yourserver.co.uk/api/v2_soap?wsdl
Attempting to download metadata from 'http://yourserver.co.uk/api/v2_soap?wsdl’ using WS-Metadata Exchange or DISCO.
(Lots of error messages here…)Error: Cannot import wsdl:portType
Detail: An exception was thrown while running a WSDL import extension: System.Se
rviceModel.Description.XmlSerializerMessageContractImporter
Error: The ' ' character, hexadecimal value 0x20, cannot be included in a name.
Parameter name: name
XPath to Error Source: //wsdl:definitions[@targetNamespace='urn:Magento']/wsdl:p
ortType[@name='Mage_Api_Model_Server_V2_HandlerPortType']Error: Cannot import wsdl:binding
Detail: There was an error importing a wsdl:portType that the wsdl:binding is de
pendent on.
XPath to wsdl:portType: //wsdl:definitions[@targetNamespace='urn:Magento']/wsdl:
portType[@name='Mage_Api_Model_Server_V2_HandlerPortType']
XPath to Error Source: //wsdl:definitions[@targetNamespace='urn:Magento']/wsdl:b
inding[@name='Mage_Api_Model_Server_V2_HandlerBinding']Error: Cannot import wsdl:port
Detail: There was an error importing a wsdl:binding that the wsdl:port is depend
ent on.
XPath to wsdl:binding: //wsdl:definitions[@targetNamespace='urn:Magento']/wsdl:b
inding[@name='Mage_Api_Model_Server_V2_HandlerBinding']
XPath to Error Source: //wsdl:definitions[@targetNamespace='urn:Magento']/wsdl:s
ervice[@name='MagentoService']/wsdl:port[@name='Mage_Api_Model_Server_V2_Handler
Port']Generating files...
Warning: No code was generated.
If you were trying to generate a client, this could be because the metadata docu
ments did not contain any valid contracts or services
or because all contracts/services were discovered to exist in /reference assembl
ies. Verify that you passed all the metadata documents to the tool.Warning: If you would like to generate data contracts from schemas make sure to
use the /dataContractOnly option.c:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin>
So I did a little digging through the WSDL and found an undocumented bug in Magneto’s schema.
First I saved a local copy of the WSDL and used visual studio to reformat the document into some sort of readable state, then I had to make a few corrections to the WSDL to allow SvcUtil to correctly parse the malformed document.
Change 1: Replace a badly encoded apostrophe – I removed the “’s” from the following operation definition…
<operation name="customerGroupList">
<documentation>Retrieve customer’s groups</documentation>
<input message="typens:customerGroupListRequest"/>
<output message="typens:customerGroupListResponse"/>
</operation>
Change 2: Replace a trailing space in an operation name
<message name="catalogProductGetSpecialPriceRequest">
<part name="sessionId" type="xsd:string"></part>
<part name="product" type="xsd:string"></part>
<part name="storeView " type="xsd:string"></part>
</message>
If you look carefully at the above message definition, you’ll notice that name=”storeView “ contains a space, making the wsdl invalid. Remove the space so it reads “storeView”.
With these two errors corrected, SvcUtil had no problem generating an appropriate WCF proxy from the corrected wsdl file.
Magneto will hopefully fix this error in the WSDL, but until this time, it’s probably quite safe to follow these steps to generate your own proxy.
To reproduce:
- Go to http://yourserver.co.uk/api/v2_soap?wsdl and save the contents of your file to the local disk (c:\test\main.wsdl)
- Open the file in visual studio, and reformat the document for readability (CTRL+K, CTRL+D).
- Remove the apostrophe from the documentation tag for the customerGroupList operation.
- Remove the space after the name=”storeView “ in the catalogProductGetSpecialPriceRequest message definition.
- Open a command prompt and enter
- c:\test>c:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin\svcutil.exe main.wsdl
- SvcUtil will produce two files, Magento.cs (your WCF proxy) and output.config, your endpoint configuration.