Using Java SOAP libraries for convenience

To access the ILIAS SOAP administration you may use any software supporting WSDL SOAP calls.

The standard procedure to use the SOAP functions is:

• call the login function with your ILIAS user data to login into the ILIAS system and to retrieve a valid session ID

• use the session ID to call any other of the SOAP administration functions

The following example shows how to access the SOAP interface using the Java programming language. In this specific example, the open source library kSOAP2 is used to access the ILIAS SOAP server. kSOAP2 is extremely lightweighted (< 100 kB) and easy to understand which makes it very attractive. You may as well use other libraries like Apache Axis2/Java or Codehaus XFire.

The example shows a login process and it deals with one of the complex datatypes in the ILIAS SOAP administration, the ilUserData structure. Common datatypes like xsd:string, xsd:integer and xsd:boolean are mapped to the standard Java datatypes String, Integer and Boolean. Complex datatypes which can be defined in WSDL can be implemented as a Java class implementing the KvmSerializable interface. To demonstrate this advanced use of the SOAP interface, a call of the getUser and addUser functions will be demonstrated too.