Who's Hurt - SOAP - A How-to Guide

SOAP was designed to be a language-agnostic way to transfer objects from one computer to another. When I refer to language I am talking about computer languages. Some people like to program in Java while others might prefer C, C++, or C#. However there are plenty of other languages to choose from including PHP which is really popular on the web.

There are a lot of good online resources for SOAP. Here's a good an intro to SOAP YouTube video done by a fellow in India. You would do well to watch it a few times and feel free to watch other videos as well.

If you stuck with me this far then congratulations! You are on your way to becoming a SOAP initiate! Some languages do a really good job at hiding all of the complexities of SOAP and PHP is one of them. Let's look at some PHP examples of how to use SOAP to access our databases here at footballbook.pro.

I'm going to be using PHP on a Linux command line. You might be using PHP on a Windows box or Mac, it really shouldn't matter. The only thing is that your PHP should be version 5 and should have SOAP enabled.

Remember, you don't have to use PHP. You can use any computer language that supports SOAP that you are comfortable with. The .NET people out there can use that if they like. I'll use PHP just because I think it makes the examples really simple.

We'll keep our first lesson fairly simple. The NFL assigns a unique identifier (or ID) to every game. Let's use our SOAP interface to print out the Game ID (gid) for Atlanta's game in Week 7 of the 2010 season. We'll call our first PHP program "lesson1.php" and it looks like this:

PHP Code:


<?php
$oSoapClient = new SoapClient("http://www.footballbook.pro/fbk.wsdl");
 
$szGid = $oSoapClient->getGameId(2010,7,"ATL");
$aoGameProperties = $oSoapClient->getGame($szGid);
 
$szVis = $aoGameProperties['vis'];
$szHome = $aoGameProperties['home'];
 
echo "The GameID for $szVis vs $szHome is $szGid.\n\n";
?>

The output from the previous program looks like this:

Code:

# php lesson1.php
The GameID for CIN vs ATL is 2010102400.

In Lesson 2 we'll get some player information. You've heard it before that we're all just a number? Well every player in the NFL is a number. Or at least kind of a number. Just like every game has a unique id, every player has a unique id. Let's find out Tom Brady's player id (pid).

One of our SOAP messages returns the pid if you give us the team and the jersey number of any player. So if you know anything about football then you know that Brady plays on the Patriots (the team code for the Pat's is "NE") and his jersey number is 12. So we'll feed this info into the getPlayer() message and see what we get back. Save the following in a file called "lesson2.php" and run the program.

PHP Code:


<?php
$oSoapClient = new SoapClient("http://www.footballbook.pro/fbk.wsdl");
 
$szPid = $oSoapClient->getPlayerId('NE',12);
$aoPlayerProperties = $oSoapClient->getPlayer($szPid );
 
print_r($aoPlayerProperties);
?>

The output from lesson 2 is as follows:

Code:

# php lesson2.php
Array
(
    [team] => NE
    [number] =>
    [firstname] =>
    [lastname] =>
    [link] => /players/tombrady/profile?id=BRA371156
    [pid] => BRA371156
    [pos] => QB
    [status] => ACT
    [ht] => 76
    [wt] => 225
    [doby] => 1977
    [dobm] => 8
    [dobd] => 3
    [exp] => 11
    [college] => Michigan
    [rating] =>
    [depth] => 1
    [probowler] =>
    [starter] =>
)

In Lesson 3 we will get the injury status for Tom Brady in the 2010 Season for Week 13. We'll take Tom Brady's pid and feed it into the getInjury() SOAP message along with the season and week to get Brady's injury status. The code for Lesson 3 is here. Save this to a file called "lesson3.php" and run it.

PHP Code:


<?php
$oSoapClient = new SoapClient("http://www.footballbook.pro/fbk.wsdl");
 
$szPid = $oSoapClient->getPlayerId('NE',12);
$aoProperties = $oSoapClient->getInjury(2010,13,$szPid);
 
print_r($aoProperties);
?>

The output from lesson 3 is as follows:[CODE]# php lesson2.php

Code:

# php lesson3.php
Array
(
    [season] => 2010
    [week] => 13
    [pid] => BRA371156
    [team] => NE
    [pos] => QB
    [injury] =>
    [gamestatus] => Probable
    [pracstatus] => Brady (foot/shoulder) was held out of practice Tuesday, Ian Rapoport of the Boston Herald reports.
)

For those of you who know how Bill Belichick runs the Patriots it should come as no surprise that Brady is injured. He's been injured for 8 years.

In the last lesson I'll show you how ridiculously easy SOAP can make getting information. Let's write a short program to get the entire roster for the Indianapolis Colts for Week 5 of the 2010 season.

Here is the code to get that information. It is a two line program and the code looks like this:

PHP Code:


<?php
$oSoapClient = new SoapClient("http://www.footballbook.pro/fbk.wsdl");
 
print_r( $oSoapClient->getRoster(2010,7,"IND") );
?>

Here is the output for Lesson 4:

Code:

How simple was that?

Anyways, that it for now. There will be more lessons in the future but this has been an intro into how to use SOAP. You don't have to screen scrape anymore. If you need NFL stats then you can get them from footballbook.pro!

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