PHP connecting to WCF Service parsing return data

Question

I'm having a problem parsing the data being returned by my WCF web service.

The web service is passing back an array of strings, this data is put into a StdClass object, the problem i'm encountering is that the data changes depending on whether there is 1 or more objects.

Having never dealt with stdclass objects I'm not really sure what to do.

The following is the code i'm currently using, $containers is the return value from the web service call.

<ul>
<?php var_dump($containers)?>
<?php foreach($containers as $item):?>
<li>
<?php 
echo $item->string;
?>
</li>
<?php endforeach;?>
</ul>

If there is just 1 value being returned then the following code works fine and displays the returned container name. If there is more than 1 value being returned $item->string becomes Array. is there anyway to determine what values stdclass contains?

var_dump with just 1 container

object(stdClass)[13]
public 'GetContainersResult' => 
object(stdClass)[14]
public 'string' => string 'container1' (length=10)

var_dump with more than 1 container

object(stdClass)[13]
public 'GetContainersResult' => 
object(stdClass)[14]
public 'string' => 
array
0 => string 'container1' (length=10)
1 => string 'container2' (length=10)

Thanks in advance,

Matt

Answer 1

you can use is_array($item->string) to check if you have an array and then process it appropriately. Based on your code, I think something like this might work for you.

<?php var_dump($containers)?>
<ul>
<?php foreach($containers as $item):
         if(is_array($item->string)):
            foreach($item->string as $subitem):
                <li class="subitem"><?php echo $subitem; ?></li>
            <?php 
            endforeach;
         else: ?>
        <li><?php echo $item->string; ?></li>
          <?php 
          endif;
      endforeach;    
?>
</ul>