Simple XML POST and reply

A customer has an app that needs to post and get XML data from a website. This task was being handled by .asp scripts on a Windows box, but now they want it moved to Linux and Perl.

This was a very easy and quick job because there really wasn't much to do. Their app creates the XML files that are posted to the web server and reads the XML files that result. There's no need for error checking - the app reacts appropriately to missing, garbled or stale results. Basically the Perl script just blasts out whatever they tell it to and blindly writes the results. I wish all my scripts had that luxury!

Here's the basic script. It could also be written to accept three arguments, but this version has them copy and modify for each need.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request::Common;

# modify these variables as needed

my $sendXML="INPUT.XML";
my $resultXML="RESULT.XML";
my $webpage="http://somewhere/process.asp";

# program starts here
my $message="";
open(XML,$sendXML);
while (<XML>) {
  $message .="$_";
}
close XML;
 
my $userAgent = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $response = $userAgent->request(POST $webpage,
Content_Type => 'text/xml',
Content => $message);

open(OUT, ">$resultXML");
print OUT $response->content;
close OUT;

That's it. This script ignores headers, ignores errors, ignores anything bad that could happen. You could check all that here if you needed to, but in this case, we don't have to bother. Isn't life grand?

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Wed Mar 24 14:04:57 2010: 8263   TonyLawrence




By the way, the reason I didn't write this to process arguments is because the Windows junk was written as separate scripts for each task - even though the task is identical and only the gozinta and gozouta changes.

Worse, the Windows script didn't even set variables to modify - the files were hard-coded:

xmlHttp.open("GET", "Request.XML", false)

Windows programmers are led into dumb programming by the very nature of Windows. Nothing forces them into this, but the ideas that are just burned into Unix folk just don't seem to occur to them.




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