Making SOAP Requests

Topics

This section provides information on making SOAP requests with the Amazon SimpleDB web service.

About SOAP Requests

The Amazon SimpleDB web service supports the SOAP message protocol for calling service operations over an HTTP connection. The easiest way to use the SOAP interface with your application is to use a SOAP toolkit. SOAP toolkits are available for most popular programming languages and platforms.

The service's Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) file describes the operations and the format and data types of their requests and responses. Your SOAP toolkit interprets the WSDL file to provide your application access to the operations. For most toolkits, your application calls a service operation using routines and classes provided or generated by the toolkit.

For information on the WSDL file, see API Conventions.

Using Parameters with SOAP

The API reference in this guide describes the parameters and their values for each operation. You might find it useful to view the WSDL file directly to see how the request parameters appear in the XML that your toolkit generates. You can also see how your toolkit makes the operations available to your application code.

Sample SOAP Request

This section provides a sample REST request and response.

The request element contains the AWSAccessKeyId, Timestamp, and Signature. These authenticate that you sent the request. For more information on these values, see AWS Request Authentication.

In addition to the request authentication parameters, the request element contains the parameters of the specific operation being called. For a description of an operation's parameters, see the appropriate page for the operation in the API reference.

For more information about these parameters and their values, see Common Parameters.

SOAP Request

The following example is the XML for a SOAP message that calls the PutAttributes operation. While you probably don't need to build the SOAP message for a service request manually, it is useful to see what your SOAP toolkit tries to produce when provided with the appropriate values. Many SOAP toolkits require that you build a request data structure similar to the XML to make a request.

In this example the PutAttributes element contains:

DomainName element which is common to all operations
ItemName element that is used in some, but not all operations

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope 
xmlns:SOAP-ENV='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/' 
xmlns:SOAP-ENC='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/' 
xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance' 
xmlns:xsd='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema'>
  <SOAP-ENV:Body>
    <PutAttributesRequest xmlns='http://sdb.amazonaws.com/doc/2007-11-07'>
      <Attribute><Name>a1</Name><Value>2</Value></Attribute>
      <Attribute><Name>a2</Name><Value>4</Value></Attribute>
      <DomainName>domain1</DomainName>
      <ItemName>eID001</ItemName>
      <Version>2007-11-07</Version>
    </PutAttributesRequest>
  </SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

SOAP Response

Following is the sample response:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope 
xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
  <SOAP-ENV:Body>
    <PutAttributesResponse xmlns="http://sdb.amazonaws.com/doc/2007-11-07">
      <ResponseMetadata>
        <RequestId>4c68e051-fe45-43b2-992a-a24017ffe7ab</RequestId>
        <BoxUsage>0.0000219907</BoxUsage>
      </ResponseMetadata>
    </PutAttributesResponse>
  </SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>