A look at the WFF SOAP API

The WFF SOAP API, provides a simple way to build applications ‘on top’ of Web Forms generated by WFF.

The WFF SOAP service can essentially be seen as an API, since it allows you to build other web applications ‘on top’ of WFF. Generating web forms through SOAP produces exactly the same results as using the WFF web interface The only difference being that SOAP allows you to generate the web forms programmatically.

There’s 2 main SOAP methods:

GetFactoryVersion( )

and

GeneratePackage( )

GetFactoryVersion simply returns the current version of Web Form Factory.

GeneratePackage generates a web form and all necessary back-end code which allows the generated web form to collect data. One of the parameters taken in by the GeneratePackage function is the html source (encoded in base64). This can be fed by the developer either by reading an html file using file_get_contents or any other valid method which gives returns a string representation of an html file. Once this html file is provided to the SOAP web service , WFF analyzes the html and detects all inputs. WFF then maps those inputs to database fields/columns and generates PHP object classes that allow the form to collect data.

The result of the GeneratePackage SOAP function, known as the ‘package’ is returned to the developer in the form of a base64 encoded string.
The package is a string representation of a zip file and can be converted into such by calling

$zip = new zipfile();

$zip -> addPOGPackage($package);

$zip -> forceDownload(); //prompts user to download the zip file

Note that the code snippet above requires the ZIP class which is part of the WFF source code

There are several potentially interesting uses of the WFF SOAP API. For example, a simple HTML editor could make use of the WFF SOAP API to bind any HTML form created within the editor to a database by querying WFF for the necessary back-end code.

We hope that, by providing this improved documentation of the WFF SOAP API, as well as providing the entire WFF source code, you’ll have a good idea on how WFF can be used within your own applications. If you have any questions or would like to discuss the WFF SOAP API, feel free to do so on the WFF Google Group