Hints on Savon and Rails

So I had to use the Savon gem recently, and there’s a couple pitfalls that aren’t super well documented.

There’s a couple great resources for learning however. Most notable are the Savon docs themselves and Ryan Bates’ RailsCasts. Keep in mind that Ryan Bates is using an older version of the gem, so refer to the docs for syntax.

Before you tear into your SOAP integration, you may do well to make sure the api responds expectedly using wsdlbrowser.com. That will give you a list of available actions (granted you can do that with Savon too). Stay away from SOAPui that Ryan Bates recommends. In my experience it was totally unusable on Mac OS 10.9. That and it’s probably a little too feature heavy for your average SOAP integration. YMMV.

The biggest pitfall I came across was that Savon will not do anything unless you have httpclient also installed. This is not in the Savon docs at all, I found it on an old closed issue in the github repo.

Once you have that going, you’ll probably be set.

Feel free to contact me on twitter @davidwdegraw if you have any questions or comments.