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Handling Soap timeouts in PHP

Asked 2009-05-07T14:59:40.273
36

I'm working on a project where I am verifying information from a user with a SOAP web service. I currently am taking care of errors assuming that I'm receiving responses from the web service, but also need to handle the edge cases of a service timeout or unavailability.

In the case of a timeout or service unavailability, I need to pretend that the request was successful (that the web service approved the info), but I'm not clear on what exceptions are thrown.

Some pseudo-code:

// $client is PHP's SoapClient class
try {
  $response = $client->SomeSoapRequest();
}
catch(SoapFault $e){
  // handle issues returned by the web service
}
catch(Exception $e){
  // handle PHP issues with the request
}

What I can't seem to find is:

  1. Are timeouts a SoapFault? If so, what is the best way to distinguish between a timeout error and web service issues (like a type error, etc.)? I found one page that mentioned an error where the message was something to the effect of "Error loading headers", but didn't mention if this was a Soap fault.
  2. How is a service unavailability potentially going to happen? A PHP exception seems like it would make sense (a SoapFault would be returned from the web service where unavailability would be a socket issue or similar)?
  3. Is there an existing service (e.g. example) that I can test a timeout against? Most timeout related discussions seem to be related to preventing timeouts by extending the default timeout setting, which isn't ideal in this situation.
php web-services soap error-handling
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3 Answers

7

Looks like default_socket_timeout is not taken into account when making SOAP calls over HTTPS:

Bug open at the time of writing. As a comment on the blog post Robert Ludwick referenced in a deleted answer Timing Out PHP Soap Calls (21 Oct 2009; by Published by Robert F. Ludwick) points out, the workaround the post discusses (overriding SoapClient::__doRequest() with a curl request) works around this bug also.

Another related bug is:

The code mentioned in the blog post has undergone some changes and can be found in it's latest form with support of HTTP authentication here on Github:

In any case, the workaround shouldn't be needed any longer as this problem has been fixed in the PHP SOAPClient extension.

answered 2010-09-08T19:41:01.937
4

To deal with timeouts in the service

$client = new SoapClient($wsdl, array("connection_timeout"=>10));

// SET SOCKET TIMEOUT
if(defined('RESPONSE_TIMEOUT') &&  RESPONSE_TIMEOUT != '') {
 ini_set('default_socket_timeout', RESPONSE_TIMEOUT);
}
answered 2009-05-07T16:53:39.783
3

From my experience, if $e->getMessage is "Error Fetching http headers", you are dealing with a network timeout.

If $e->getMessage is something like "Cannot connect to host", the service you are trying to reach is down.

Then there is "Looks like we got no XML document", which is more cryptic an can mean different things.

answered 2010-12-20T16:15:08.893

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