Rails External XML Services

This Rails project is a sample to communicate with 3rd party services that uses XML (RSS type) as their request/response body.

Other XML services (WSDL, SOAP or RDF type) are not covered (or will be added - when necessary) since there are already gems to assist in that area.

Concept

There are 3 main parts to the concept.

1. Adapter Class
2. Service Class
3. Schema (Helper Class)

Flow

But first, we go through an example flow:

1. User details are filled in and submitted
2. Once user is successfully created, the controller calls the adapter to submit the request to a 3rd party service's endpoint

Adapter

The adapter acts like a plug-n-play 3rd party wrapper for communicating with their endpoints (in our case - CompanyFooAdapter)

1. The adapter builds the user data into an XML through a service called BuildUserXmlService
2. The XML is then sent to the 3rd party endpoint

Service

The service builds the user data based on the schema received from the 3rd party

Schema

1. The 3rd party provides an XML request/response body sample
2. We create a 3rd party schema wrapper (in our case - CompanyFooWrapper) that loads the XML request/response body sample file into callable methods

More Info

To understand more what's happening under the hood, simply run $ rspec --format documentation or dive into the codes