Send data from a Drupal site to a web service

Question

Is there an existing module that sends data from any form from my Drupal site to a web service?

UPDATING my PROGRESS:

Ok, I decided to continue my project using cURL. I created my form that contains 2 fields: "Name" and "Phone" and a submit button. (All in my own module)

Then I show my code that I just did. However, when I see the web service. The shipping data, not shown. I did a debug and uh I realized that when running: "curl_exec ($ch)" returns me FALSE.

function mymodule_form_submit($form, &$form_state){    
    $name = $form_state['values']['name'];
    $phone = $form_state['values']['phone'];

    $att = array(
        'name' => $name,
        'phone' => $phone
    );

    $attendee = http_build_query($att, '', '&');

    $url = 'http://[IP]/event/management/attendee';

    $headers = array('Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded');


    $userpasswd = 'user:pass';

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $userpasswd);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $attendee);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT, TRUE);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, FALSE);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
}

The params,in the web service, are: attendee['name'], attendee['phone']. What is my error?

UPDATE 2: NOW with this code, the variable $result return me a bool(TRUE). That tell me that the data was pass to the webservice. But, when I see the web service, I see no records with the data that I supposedly sent.

Answer 1

Well, it probably depends on the type of web service you want to send data to, but there is this module, REST API Query, for REST web services (http://drupal.org/project/rest_api_query).

This week we needed to send an issue report form data from a Drupal site to a Redmine issue tracker, using the Redmine web API. We played around with the above module, but finally decided to do it in plain PHP, using CURL.

Here's the code we are using (inside the custom Drupal module we made), so you can get a general idea. You can easily adapt to your specific needs.

$url = {The API url here};
$userpasswd = {api-user}:{api-pass};
$xml = {XML payload};

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $userpasswd);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: text/xml'));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $xml);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

UPDATE: There is a drupal core function that performs the same task, drupal_http_request. I guess it would be better to use that one, doing it the drupal way and all :-) I have not yet tried it out though. http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes!common.inc/function/drupal_http_request

Answer 2

I think your best bet would be to create a mini module yourself that will hook on the form submit event and gather all the data from your form and send them over to the other side. I have done something similar by getting some data out of the db, encoding them onto a url and posting it to the remote server.

Actually consider storing the info before sending it over, as services and connections are not always available and you might need to retry in a few minutes or the next cron.

function mymodule_form_alter(&$form, $form_state, $form_id) { 
   if (isset($form['#node']) && $form['#node']->type .'_node_form' == $form_id) {
        $form['buttons']['submit']['#submit'][] = 'my_custom_function'; 
   } 
}

Then you create a custom function:

function mymodule_custom_function(){
    drupal_http_request(urlencode('http://www.service.com/la.php?id=15&code=mpla'));
    //if that fails add the failed data on the DB to retry later.
}

function mymodule_cron(){
     //retry failed attempts
}

Or something like that.

Answer 3

Check out the Services module. You might have to write a bit of a plug-in to get it from your form (Webform?) but Services provides the framework.

SERVICES:

A standardized solution of integrating external applications with Drupal. Service callbacks may be used with multiple interfaces like REST, XMLRPC, JSON, JSON-RPC, SOAP, AMF, etc. This allows a Drupal site to provide web services via multiple interfaces while using the same callback code.