From variable to function?

[mengrie]

Hello,

I am writing a small Perl program to atest the availbility of a webservice.

So the idea is to call a known method of a known webservice and check the result.

To make the program flexible and to allow me to test several webservices I pass te following params from the command line

SOAP-ping.pl [ -u url ] [ -p proxy ] [ -m method ]

eg: perl SOAP-Ping.pl -u http://www.soaplite.com/Demo -p http://services.soaplite.com/hibye.cgi -m hi()

I pick up the params using the use Getopt::Std;

and pass them to the SOAP::Lite object.

Passing the URL & proxy is not an issue but the method is causing me a headegde.

As I get the method as a variable (string) I can not pass it to SOAP::Lite as this requires it in a different form.

my $soap = SOAP::Lite
           -> uri($url)                     
           -> proxy($proxy);
 
# this ain't working           
my $result = $soap->$method;
 
#The code that works is
my $result = $soap->hi();
 

How can I make this last line variable so I can pass the method via the command line instead of 'hard coded' in de code?

Here is the full version of my test program

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# http://guide.soaplite.com/#writing%20a%20client
# http://www.robertprice.co.uk/robblog...ith_Perl.shtml
#  Usage: SOAP-ping.pl [ -u url ] [ -p proxy ] [ -m method ]
 
####################################
# Modules                          #
####################################
use Getopt::Std;
use Time::HiRes qw (time);
 
use SOAP::Lite;
 
####################################
# Globals                          #
####################################
 
####################################
# Get the parameters from the user #
####################################
%options=();
getopts("u:p:m:",\%options);
 
my $url    = defined($options{u}) ? $options{u} : "http://localhost/";
my $proxy  = defined($options{p}) ? $options{p} : "http://localhost/";
my $method = defined($options{m}) ? $options{m} : "";
 
####################################
# Test Connection                  #
####################################
 
printf("Url: %s\nProxy %s\nMethod: %s\n",$url, $proxy, $method);
 
# Calculate the time it takes
my $start = time();
 
my $soap = SOAP::Lite
           -> uri($url)                     
           -> proxy($proxy);
 
my $result = $soap->hi();
 
unless ($result->fault)
{
    print $result->result(),"\n";
}
else
{
    print join ', ', 
      $result->faultcode, 
      $result->faultstring;
}
 
my $soaptime = time() - $start;
 
printf("%d\n%d\n",$soaptime * 1000, $soaptime * 1000);
 

To test it:

perl SOAP-Ping.pl -u http://www.soaplite.com/Demo -p http://services.soaplite.com/hibye.cgi -m hi()

Thx in advance for anyone helping me out here

Regards

Marc

[KevinADC]

If will probably need to use a hash table that defines which method the variable passed in the command line should call:

my %coms = {
    hi => \&hi;
    foo => \&foo,
}
 
my $result = $soap->$coms{$method}->();

so there is still some hard coding but you can pass in method names and the script will call the corresponding method. Or maybe someone knows of a different way to go about it.

[KevinADC]

Read the SOAP::Lite documentation, there might be an option in the new method that allows you to call method: call() I have never used SOAP::Lite so I have no experience with it's methods. My above suggextion should still wok if you wanted to go that route.