Why does one of many attributes does not get updated with SOAPv2 WS-I?

Question

I'm using Magento CE 1.7.0.2 with SOAPv2 and WS-I. I'm trying to update products with the catalogProductUpdate-Method.

The description in the code example below gets updated, but the manufacturer-attribute (=select) doesn't. The result of catalogProductUpdate is bool(true).

I tried some (not too good, but I'm desperate ;-) ) variations such as:

1. assign the integer value 777 to $manufacturer->value set the value
2. within/without the additional_attributes field set the product id (but I'm sure it need's to be set within additional_attributes)
3. set the manufacturer-name as $manufacturer->value instead of the value 777

Code:

$newProductData = new stdClass();
$additionalAttrs = array();

$manufacturer = new stdClass();
$manufacturer->key = "manufacturer";
$manufacturer->value = "777";
$additionalAttrs['single_data'][] = $manufacturer;

$newProductData->description = "Description Test1";
$newProductData->additional_attributes = $additionalAttrs;

$result = $client->catalogProductUpdate((object)array('sessionId' => $sessionId,
        'productId' => "2110000010058 ",
        'productData' => (object)$newProductData,
        NULL,
        'sku'
    ));

Edit:

• I tested it with SOAPv2 without WS-I - works fine.
• I also created another attribute for testing with the same settings (Dropdown, Scope,...) which also doesn't get updated with SOAPv2 WS-I but does with SOAPv2. So these newly created attributes behave as the manufacturer-attribute.
• Trying to set the value of a text-field within the additional_attributes doesn't work either.

Any ideas, links, suggestions on this?

Link: http://www.magentocommerce.com/api/soap/catalog/catalogProduct/catalog_product.update.html

Answer 1

I finally found the reason for the problem and the solution:

The problem: SOAPv2 with WS-I does not use the single_data and multi_data attributes. Therefore the check in /app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Product/Api/V2.php in _prepareDataForSave fails. The method _prepareDataForSave checks for single_data and multi_data which are both not part of the SOAP-Call, according to the WSDL for SOAPv2 with WS-I.

SOAPv2 (WSDL) - catalogProductCreateEntity:

<element name="additional_attributes" type="typens:catalogProductAdditionalAttributesEntity" minOccurs="0"/>

SOAPv2 with WS-I (WSDL) - catalogProductCreateEntity:

<xsd:element name="additional_attributes" type="typens:associativeArray" minOccurs="0">
</xsd:element>

associativeArray is of type associativeEntity which includes key/value pairs. In SOAPv2 withous WS-I, the catalogProductAdditionalAttributesEntity is used (which consists of single_data and/or multi_data values which again include key/value pairs).

This is the SOAPv2 WS-I part of the WSDL which describes the format of additional_attributes:

<xsd:complexType name="associativeEntity">
   <xsd:sequence>
      <xsd:element name="key" type="xsd:string"/>
      <xsd:element name="value" type="xsd:string"/>
   </xsd:sequence>
</xsd:complexType>
<xsd:complexType name="associativeArray">
   <xsd:sequence>
      <xsd:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" name="complexObjectArray" type="typens:associativeEntity"/>
   </xsd:sequence>
</xsd:complexType>

The check for additional_attributes /app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Product/Api/V2.php worded fine, but the check for single_data or multi_data always returned false.

The solution:

I found another SOAP Problem here where the last answer was the solution to my problem: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9502311/865443). So I put this block in my code in _prepareDataForSave which solved the problem of setting the additional_attributes values:

if (gettype($productData->additional_attributes) == 'array') {
            foreach ($productData->additional_attributes as $k => $v) {
                    $_attrCode = $k;
                    $productData->$_attrCode = $v;
            }
  }

I hope this helps someone else encountering the same problem. I would also appreciate an explanation for this differencde between SOAPv2 and SOAPv2 WS-I and/or other ways which solved this problem.