Use WsdlToPhp to manage your Magento website with its SOAP API

Requirements

Your server must run the latest PHP version with the native SoapClient class.

For this sample, we use the generated package associated to the Magento Web service. This package and all the following samples have been made with the Magento official version from http://svn.magentocommerce.com/source/branches/1.7.

In order to access to the WSDL of your Magento website, please refer to the official online documentation for SOAP.

You should use the URL containing the string api/v2_soap?wsdl=1 so the complete path to the WSDL on your Magento website should look like this : http://www.my-magento-website.com/api/v2_soap?wsdl=1.

The generated package includes :

• the sample file: the file that shows you how to start using the generated package
• the autoload file: the file which loads all the generated class with the good path
• the main WsdlClass class: the class from which each generated class inherits in order to inherit usefull methods and generic methods to deal with the SoapClient
• the ClassMap class: the class which defines the mapping between native Magento Web service structs and generated classes
• all the classes required to communicate with the Magento SOAP API

If you have a good IDE, then it should be really easy to navigate through all these numerous classes.

Call Magento SOAP API operations with WsdlToPhp

First step: give access to your Magento SOAP API

The Magento SOAP Web service requires that you create a session id by calling the Magento login operation with an username and an api key. These informations are related to an user that has to be associated to your Magento SOAP Web service.

First of all, you must create at least one role under the menu System > Web Services > SOAP/XML-RPC - Roles and then create at least one user associated to the role under the menu  System > Web Services > SOAP/XML-RPC - Users.

Be sure to give enough rights to the role you just created so you can call any operation we are going to. In any case, you'll able to update the rights afterwards so don't panic.

Second step: load classes and set configuration

The generated package includes an autoload file which makes easy to load all the generated classes at once.

We suppose your file is located in the root directory of the extracted package you just downloaded.

When all classes are loaded, you can define the configuration to call the SOAP Web service. This configuration is required to instantiate any Magento Service class.

Third step: create a session id

In order to call any SOAP operation on your Magento website, you need to be logged in with the username and api key you created previously.

To create a session id, you have to call the login operation. The sample code below shows how to achieve this operation:

The XML request looks like this:

The XML response looks like this:

As you can see, the session id is contained by the loginReturn XML tag and is simply retrieved by calling the $magentoServiceLogin->getResult() method.

If you don't succeed to retrieve a valid session id then look to the last generated error by calling the $magentoServiceLogin->getLastError() method.

From now, we are able to call any operation using the $sessionId variable created.

First service call: retrieve your Magento version and edition

To do so, we are going to call the Magento Info operation. This operation is detailed on the official Magento Info API page for Magento Info and it should return the version and the edition of the Magento website.

Proceed like this:

This simple call generates this XML request:

That should return this XML response:

The $magentoInfo variable is a MagentoStructMagentoInfoEntity object as:

So you can easily display this information like this :

Which should diplay: Your Magento version is 1.7.0.2 of the Community edition.

Second service calls: store list and store info

We are going to call successively the storeList and the storeInfo operations. The second operation will be called using the result of the first one.

Get your store list:

The $storeList variable should be an array that contains MagentoStructStoreEntity objects as:

In comparison, the XML response looks like:

Now that we have at least one store returned, we can call the storeInfo operation to see what additional informations we can retrieve compared to those returned by the storeList operation.

This call uses the previous result as the $storeList array variable. When we look to the XML response, we can see that it returns the same informations that are also contained by a MagentoStructStoreEntity object:

So the PHP result, as the $storeInfo variable, is:

Third service calls: deal with your Magento catalog

Magento Web service provides a lot of operations to manage your website programmatically so you can easily import/export data from it. In our case, we are going to:

1. Retrieve the category tree of the Magento website
2. Retrieve the informations about a specific category
3. Try to delete a specific category
4. Create a product from scratch
5. Retrieve the product list to validate the data associated to the product created previously

All these operations are going to use the Magento catalog operations. In order to do that, we initiate the service object dedicated to the catalog operations such as:

From now, we'll always use the $magentoServiceCatalog object in order to call the operations to achieve the five steps enumerated previously.

Retrieve the category tree

Now that we have the caller initiated, we can easily call the Magento catalogCategoryTree operation like below:

As we don't define any parentId an neither the storeView, we are going to get all the category tree.

For your Magento website, here is the XML response:

This XML resquest corresponds to a MagentoStructCatalogCategoryTree object as the $catalogCategoryTree variable:

We have the Root category we created manually from the Backend contained by the default Magento Root Catalog category.

The Default Category is also one of the default Magento category.

Let's retrieve one category informations.

Retrieve a category info

As we retrieved the categories, we are going to use the previous result, $catalogCategoryTree, to get the Default Category information stored in Magento by calling the Magento catalogCategoryInfo operation:

This call returns many informations about the category. The XML response looks like this:

So the $catalogCategoryInfo variable is a MagentoStructCatalogCategoryInfo object that contains the informations of the XML response:

Try to delete a category

The deletion of a category is made calling the Magento catalogCategoryDelete operation. Before doing this, you should ensure that you won't delete the wrong category. To validate the call, we would advice you to create a fake category from the backend and then try to delete it with the Magento web service.

In our case, we use the previous result, as the $catalogCategoryInfo variable, to try to delete a category from the catalog. We do like below:

In our case, we are trying to delete the Default Category, so we have this message in return:

Which is pretty explicit! If you want to get it programmatically in order to send emails or notifications or whatever, you can call the method $magentoServiceCatalog->getLastError() which returns an array containing the last errors with the method name as the array key and the SoapFault as the value. It gives something like this:

As you can see, the SoapFault contains the details on the error so you can manage it as you wish.

Create a product in a category

Creating products programmatically can be very convienent when you have to make data importation from an oustide product management tool. Using the Magento catalogProductCreate operation is very useful and is pretty easy following these steps

It's always good to look at the XML request to visualize how the request is made:

And so the XML response is:

For an unknown reason, this response generates an error: PHP Fatal error:  SOAP-ERROR: Encoding: Violation of encoding rules, so it's blocking us to get the response as a PHP object. In the meantime, if you wish to retrieve the product id you've just created that is contained in the XML response, do as below:

In our example, the $productId variable is equal to 27.

Export your product list

As we just created a product, it would be great to see how its informations are returned among the product list using the Magento catalogProductList operation. Moreover, exporting the product list from magento can be useful to export them as a CSV file or a XML file or to send them to tierce marketing management tool. To get the product list, do as below:

In this case, you can get a really big XML response and so the PHP response. The PHP response is an array of MagentoStructCatalogProductEntity object and looks like:

As you can see, you can easily iterate through results and then manipulate each product as they are PHP objects.

Third service calls: manage your Magento customers

One another big thing in e-commerce is the customers. They are often managed externally by marketing tools and often with CRM tools for marketing objectives. So you will maybe wish to export them from the Magento website but you could also need to create them in your Magento website in the case you're migrating to Magento from another e-commerce solution. Doing it manually would be really fastidious so why don't do it programmatically. Once again, it is very powerful to do it programmatically as you can do it as mush time as you need once you've created the mapping process from your old e-commerce solution to your new Magento website.

We are going to use the Magento customer operations. In order to do that, we initiate the service object dedicated to the customer operations such as:

From now, we'll always use the $magentoServiceCustomer object in order to call the operations.

Create a customer

To do so, we use the Magento customerCustomerCreate operation. It's pretty the same procedure as the product create operation but for customer:

As for the product create operation, an error is triggered so you'll have to use the same trick to get the new customer id:

Add an address to a customer

We created a customer but he is pretty basic and does not hold any delivery address neither any billing address, so let's do it! To add an address to a customer, use the Magento customerAddressCreate operation:

As for the product creation and the customer creation you get the customer address you just created.

Conclusion

As we demonstrated, using the Magento SOAP API is not very hard and can really ease the automation of data manipulation prorgammatically. We can easily imagine to create  automated tasks that import or export data from or to the Magento website. This SOAP API is pretty complete and useful!

You need help or encounter issue on calling another operation, feel free to ask, we're here to help you out ;).

Anyway, we really hope it will help you handle the Magento SOAP API to fully master you e-commerce website.