adventures in soap4r and NetSuites webservices

Spent most of the day becoming familiar with soap4r in order to communicate with NetSuite. Turns out that the soap4r shipping with Ruby 1.8.5 is outdated and quite buggy compared to its gem counterpart. In fact, we would've saved a couple hours if we knew that was an option before we even started setting breakpoints.

WSDL2Ruby worked decently enough with NetSuite's WSDL but the generated file containing the classes (default.rb) had redundant entries, like 35 definitions for the Passport object. Next, there was an issue with some of the classes being incomplete. For example, RecordRef was:

class RecordRef
@@schema_type = "RecordRef"
@@schema_ns = "urn:core_2_5.platform.webservices.netsuite.com"
@@schema_element = []

def initialize
end
end

which is incorrect as it is defined as:

<complextype name="RecordRef">
<complexcontent>
<extension base="platformCore:BaseRef">
 <attribute name="internalId" type="xsd:string">
 <attribute name="externalId" type="xsd:string">
 <attribute name="type" type="platformCoreTyp:RecordType">
 <!-- primary record internalId -->
 <!-- record type -->
</attribute>
</attribute>
</attribute>
</extension></complexcontent></complextype>

The object we created to get the request working correctly is

class RecordRef
@@schema_type = "RecordRef"
@@schema_ns = "urn:core_2_5.platform.webservices.netsuite.com"

attr_accessor :internalId
attr_accessor :externalId
attr_accessor :type

def initialize(internalId = nil, externalId = nil, type = nil)
@internalId = internalId
@externalId = externalId
@type = type
end
end

Finally, calling

response = driver.login(LoginRequest.new(passport))

produced a successful response from NetSuite. However, something still seems awry with the request as the role element is not properly formed:

<n1:login xmlns:n1="urn:messages_2_5.platform.webservices.netsuite.com" xsi:type="n1:LoginRequest">
 <n1:passport xmlns:n2="urn:core_2_5.platform.webservices.netsuite.com" xsi:type="n2:Passport">
   <n2:email>test </n2:email>
   <n2:password>test</n2:password>
   <n2:account>test</n2:account>
   <n2:role xsi:type="n2:RecordRef">
   </n2:role>
 </n1:passport>
</n1:login>