Debugging SOAP with Xdebug and Eclipse

October 14 2010 : posted under php eclipse xdebug soap

It’s been a while since I’ve worked on a project which is providing as well as consuming web services.

In this case I need to debug incoming requests that are not initiated from with the browser (I’m using soapui as a test tool).

In order to allow Eclipse to pick up xdebug responses triggered by requests from soapui I just needed to

start a debuging session within eclipse as normal
ensure that the query string ?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=ECLIPSE_DBGP is appended to all requests by editing the WSDL file so that the address looks like

<soap:address location="http://dev.example.com/soap_server.php?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=ECLIPSE_DBGP"/>

make requests via soapui

Now eclipse is picking up the soap requests and I can step through as normal (some tools apply a timeout which can be a nuisance while debugging - I haven’t been using soapui long enough yet to see if that’s the case here)