We do love our JSON APIs, but sometimes we need to work and talk with the Dark Side and perform SOAP requests exchanging XML responses with a server far far away.
In our Objective-C projects we grew fond of AFNetworking, but having switched to Swift (and Swift 3 nonetheless) we had to rely on the new Alamofire 4.0.
Why new if it is a 4.0 version?
Alamofire 4.0 brings a big rewrite and some breaking changes, needed to address the new Swift 3 syntax and to ease some things up. The breaking changes involve how to make a request and how to encode our parameters, key aspects if you want to talk with a SOAP server. The changes have been introduced only recently and it seems few people had the same problem of having POST requests on a legacy SOAP server, so the literature on the web is quite scarse and this post wants to fill this gap.
As with everything, the solution when found, is quite simple.
At line #6 we set the headers up, the SOAPAction one is quite important, since without it nothing worked. As always, YMMV, but you should find the correct value inside your WSDL of reference.
At line #16 we setup the request, the encoding parameter is the key of this post: to encode the request we write an extension to String:
In this extension we specify the format for a correct header as requested by our SOAP server and serve it during every request.
And we are ready to go.
Then, if you need to parse the XML response (otherwise why talk with the server to begin with?), we suggest you to use the XMLHash library of SwiftyJSON inspiration.
We hope this little bit of information will save you some research time.