Issue

I am sending a POST request in PHP via cURL to a REST API that uses XML. When I use Postman or Advanced REST Client, I get a XML response to my POST request. However, when I use PHP and cURL I do not seem able to see back the XML responses. What do I need to do to get these back? Eventually I need to retrieve a token that I can then use to process INSERT, UPDATES and GETS through this API via XML.

Here is the code that I am currently using:

$curl = curl_init();

curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
  CURLOPT_URL => 'https://xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
  CURLOPT_ENCODING => '',
  CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10,
  CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 0,
  CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,
  CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
  CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => 'POST',
  CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array(
    'xxxxxx-Username: xxx',
    'xxxxxx-Password: xxx',
    'content-type: application/xml'
  ),
));

$response = curl_exec($curl);

curl_close($curl);
echo $response;

and currently I am getting a blank page. I have tried quite a few solutions, like the following

//header("Content-Type: text/xml");
//header('Content-type: application/xml');
//$decoded = iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $response);
//echo $decoded;

//echo $response;
//print_r($response);

// set up your xml result
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($response, LIBXML_NOCDATA);

// loop through the results
$cnt = count($xml->Result);
for($i=0; $i<$cnt; $i++){
    echo 'XML : First Name: = ';
}

but nothing seems to give me back what I get from Postman or Advanced REST Client, which on this particular command is the following

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<AuthInfo>
    <token/>
    <AuthStatus>
        <Id>503</Id>
        <Description>There's no proapi manager running with the given company code: crmapp</Description>
    </AuthStatus>
</AuthInfo>

I understand that at this stage there is an issue with my url that I need to fix, but I still should be able to receive that error back via XML.

Can anyone please help me get this XML response back so that I can progress my interface?

Thank you in advance, Adri

Thanks again Professor, here is the full debug with the latest version of PHP and cUrl

Can you please let me know what you think of this? While I am no longer getting the previous error, I still seem unable to receive the XML response back. :(

Thank you in advance, Adri

Solution

The curl function I use is as follows. It has extra debugging information in the output and the default settings can be easily overridden at runtime by supplying a different $options argument. I'm not suggesting this is the answer but with a better set of options configured and better debug info you should get closer.

function curl( $url=NULL, $options=NULL, $headers=false ){
    $cacert='c:/wwwroot/cacert.pem';
    $vbh = fopen('php://temp', 'w+');
    /*
        Download a copy of CACERT.pem from
        https://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html
        
        save to webserver and modify the $cacert variable
        to suit - ensuring that the path you choose is
        readable.
    */
    
    $res=array(
        'response'  =>  NULL,
        'info'      =>  array( 'http_code' => 100 ),
        'headers'   =>  NULL,
        'errors'    =>  NULL
    );
    if( is_null( $url ) ) return (object)$res;

    session_write_close();

    /* Initialise curl request object - these should be OK as-is */
    $curl=curl_init();
    if( parse_url( $url,PHP_URL_SCHEME )=='https' ){
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, true );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2 );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CAINFO, $cacert );
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CAPATH, $cacert );
    }

    /* Define standard options */
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL,trim( $url ) );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT, false );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 20 );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60 );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.38 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.97 Safari/537.38' );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10 );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_ENCODING, '' );
    
    /* enhanced debug */
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_NOPROGRESS, true );
    curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_STDERR, $vbh );
    

    /* Assign runtime parameters as options to override defaults if needed. */
    if( isset( $options ) && is_array( $options ) ){
        foreach( $options as $param => $value ) curl_setopt( $curl, $param, $value );
    }
    /* send any headers with the request that are needed */
    if( $headers && is_array( $headers ) ){
        curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers );
    }

    /* Execute the request and store responses */
    $res=(object)array(
        'response'  =>  curl_exec( $curl ),
        'info'      =>  (object)curl_getinfo( $curl ),
        'errors'    =>  curl_error( $curl )
    );
    rewind( $vbh );
    $res->verbose=stream_get_contents( $vbh );
    fclose( $vbh );
    curl_close( $curl );
    return $res;
}

Then, to use it:

$url='https://www.example.com/api/';
$args=array();
$headers=array(
    'xxxxxx-Username: xxx',
    'xxxxxx-Password: xxx',
    'Content-Type: application/xml'
);

$res=curl( $url, $args, $headers );
if( $res->info->http_code==200 ){
    #cool - use $res->response in further processing
    print_r($res->response,true);
}else{
    # useful information will be displayed here...
    printf('<h1>Verbose debug info</h1><pre>%s</pre>',print_r($res->verbose,true));
    printf('<h1>Info</h1><pre>%s</pre>',print_r($res->info,true));
}

Answered By - Professor Abronsius

Wednesday, November 17, 2021

[SOLVED] No XML response from cURL POST to REST API in PHP

Issue

Solution