Assistance with PHP SOAP call - Building the call based on API documentation

Question

I´m trying to request some Ticket details from the OTRS Ticketing system, via soap. I've tried searching the web with no luck regarding the 'TicketSearch()' operator in the OTRS API

I know that the SOAP connection is fine because the following 'User' object and 'GetUserData()' operator is responding with valid results and all of the users data:

try {
 $result = $client->__soapCall("Dispatch", array($user, $pass, "UserObject", "GetUserData", "UserID" , 2));
}

Now when I change that SOAP call from a User search to Ticket search, I´m getting the responce 'NULL'.

try {
 $result = $client->__soapCall("Dispatch", array($user, $pass, "TicketObject", "TicketSearch",  "Result", array("ARRAY","HASH","COUNT"), "QueueIDs", 10, "StateType", "Open"));
}

This is no surprise to me as I'm not sure how to convert the following required value into the SOAP request:

Result => 'ARRAY' || 'HASH' || 'COUNT'

You can view the corresponding API documentation here and then search for 'TicketSearch()'. Any help with fixing that request would be appreciated. My end goal is to get a list of Tickets in Queue number 10.

Answer 1

First of all, the || is the logical or operator in perl. So the documentation snippet you showed means COUNT or ARRAY or HASH; you have to choose one. And if you use COUNT you'll just get back the number of tickets that match your search criteria.

Second, you need to provide the UserID of the agent that does the search, if you don't have one (because your script is for some kind of integration) you can always use ID number 1; which has access to all queues.

Lastly the QueueIDs parameter takes an array of queue IDs; so you can search for multiple queue IDs with the single parameter.

$result = $client->__soapCall("Dispatch", array($user, $pass,
    "TicketObject", "TicketSearch",
    "UserID",    1, 
    "Result",    "ARRAY",
    "QueueIDs",  array(1), 
    "StateType", "Open"
));

Please note that the RPC interface is kind of low level, it exposes the raw OTRS API. It's not very polished and sometimes you need to do a lot of work to get the data you need, on the other hand it's very powerful.

The 'new' interface is the WSDL based web service interface; this is much more encapsulated and clean. It has two drawbacks, 1; PHP does not support using WSDLs as nice as for instance .NET or Java do, and 2; it only exposes a small part of the OTRS API's, only to create/search/modify tickets and to handle the FAQ (Knowledge Base). Stuff such as adding/removing queues, services or customers is not (yet) available.