The Bakery Everything CakePHP

This example uses the following notes table, and MVCs created with the bake script.
-- 
-- Table structure for table `notes`
-- 
CREATE TABLE `notes` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `title` varchar(50) default NULL,
  `body` text,
  `created` datetime default NULL,
  `modified` datetime default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) TYPE=MyISAM  AUTO_INCREMENT=2 ;
-- 
-- Dumping data for table `notes`
-- 
INSERT INTO `notes` VALUES (1, 'My first note', 'note body. bla, bla, bla, bla, bla.', '2006-10-29 07:23:42', '2006-10-29 07:23:42');

So, we have a controller named NotesController with the following functions: index, add, edit, delete. First thing I have to do is document my methods. Note: Currently all methods in a controller must be documented if you want to use the soap server on that class. This shouldn't be a big deal since we should be documenting all of our code anyway! The documentation uses a standard flower-box method. You must document each parameter and a return type. If the function doesn't return anything, declare the return type as void.
So my view function would go from this:
<?php
    function view($id) {
        $this->set('note', $this->Note->read(null, $id));
    }
?>
to this:
<?php
    /**
    * Get one record
    * @param int
    * @return void
    */
    function view($id) {
        $this->set('note', $this->Note->read(null, $id));
    }
?>

This function will now work in the Soap5 server. However it doesn't return anything, so you won't get any results if you call it. So make two more changes: First return the note array that you previously had passed to the view, and then declare the return type to be a string array string[]
<?php
    /**
    * Get one record
    * @param int
    * @return string[]
    */
    function view($id) {
        $note = $this->Note->read(null, $id);
        $this->set('note', $note);
        return $note['Note'];
    }
?>

So we have a documented function that works just the same as before when you use the cake view, but now we can call it from a soap client and get the results back.

Client code:
<?php
$client = new SoapClient("http://domain.com/soap5/wsdl/NotesController/");
echo "<pre>";
try {    
    print_r( $client->view(1) );
} catch (SoapFault $exception) {
    $result .= '..'.var_export($exception, true);
}
echo "</pre>";
?>
Client Results:

Array
(
    [0] => 1
    [1] => My first note
    [2] => note body. bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla.
    [3] => 2006-10-29 07:23:42
    [4] => 2006-10-29 07:23:42
)


You can view the wsdl for this class by pointing your browser to:
domain.com/soap5/wsdl/NotesController/

Looks good right? Well no, actually there is one glaring problem here. The array keys to the result array have been dropped and replaced with numerical keys. For something as simple as a note, this might be sufficient. But it certainly is not very user(developer) friendly. To overcome this problem we need to use objects to return the data as complex types. Continued on next page...