How to use SOAP with Magento

Question

I have a Magento website that I want to talk to the system that manages our stock. Developers have already developed that side of the system and they have given me SOAP methods to call, that get stock quantity, create orders, get customer id, etc.

How to I go about getting the Magento site to call these methods? Is there a plugin I can use or do I need to write everything my self, etc?

any assistance on how to use SOAP in Magento would be helpful.

Answer 1

The first thing you should have a look at is the resources available for all API SOAP Calls: http://www.magentocommerce.com/api/soap/introduction.html

Then it depends on which IDE / language your are using for your interface development. I developed a magento interface using Delphi. In Delphi its quite simple to import the WSDL-File from Magento as a resource file for my project. Once i did that, all functions from the API are available with indication of all needed parameters. Starting from logging in to Magento e.g.:

function magelogin(username, apiKey: string): loginResponseParam;
var
  myLoginParam: LoginParam;
begin
  myLoginParam := loginParam.Create;
  myLoginParam.username := username;
  myLoginParam.apiKey := apiKey;
  result := mage.login(myLoginParam);
  FreeAndNil(myLoginParam);
  mysession_id := result.result;
  result.Free;
end;

If you specify what development language and IDE you are using, i might provide a much better / detailed help :-)