Scio: Quickstart

1. Install

Scio may be installed via easy_install, pip or manually. If you are handling dependencies yourself, note that Scio requires a recent version of lxml (2.2 or later).

2. Create a client

To create a SOAP client, pass an open filehandle referencing a WSDL document to scio.Client. Scio will parse the WSDL file and generate SOAP Types and Method Calls that you can use to call SOAP services and handle the results of those calls.

>>> import scio
>>> import urllib2
>>> lyrics = scio.Client(
... urllib2.urlopen('http://lyricwiki.org/server.php?wsdl'))

3. Call a SOAP Method

To call a SOAP method, use the service attribute of the client. Refer to the method by name, and pass the parameters to the method as positional arguments. Some SOAP methods take builtin types as input, some take SOAP types. Methods return one or more SOAP types.

>>> artist, albums = lyrics.service.getArtist('Wilco')

Many simple SOAP types subclass builtin Python types and can be used almost interchangeably with them.

>>> artist
u'Wilco'
>>> type(artist)
<class 'scio.client.StringType'>

There are list-like types as well as string, object, and number-like types.

>>> type(albums)
<class 'scio.client.AlbumDataArray'>

Object-like types (Complex types in SOAP parlance) behave mostly like normal objects. See SOAP Types for some ways in which they differ.

>>> am = albums[0]
>>> type(am)
<class 'scio.client.AlbumData'>
>>> am.album
u'A.M.'
>>> am.songs
[u'I Must Be High', u'Casino Queen', u'Box Full Of Letters', u"Shouldn't Be Ashamed", u'Pick Up The Change', u'I Thought I Held You', u"That's Not The Issue", u"It's Just That Simple", u"Should've Been In Love", u'Passenger Side', u'Dash 7', u'Blue Eyed Soul', u'Too Far Apart']

4. Generate documentation

Scio includes a Sphinx extension that you can use to generate documentation for a WSDL file. This is a good way to get started when working with an unfamiliar SOAP service. See Scio: documenting SOAP services.

5. Generate client class modules

Note

Client class generation is new in Scio 0.11

Scio includes a script that can be used to generate Python code for SOAP client classes. In some cases, using statically-generated code is preferable to loading and parsing a WSDL file, and in others it is not practical or desireable to use dynamic classes.

To generate code, pass the path to a WSDL file to the generator script, scio_generate_client:

$ scio_generate_client path/to/service.wsdl > service_client.py

The script prints generated code to stdout. To use the generated client, just import it. For more information, see Scio: client code generator.