Using Zeep to make SOAP requests in Python

While most APIs are REST these days, there are still some SOAP ones out there — typically enterprise software or if you need the benefits of WS-security or the like. What brought me to SOAP was integrating with an enterprise payment gateway that had developed their own clients in several languages, but not Python, so I was on the hunt for my own. There are others, the short version of why I went with Zeep is because it was purported to be the most “modern” — we can argue about whether this was a good decision or rationale some other time. This is a pretty basic overview, but should enable you to make your first requests and clear up some hurdles I faced when some things were less clear than I would have liked in the docs.

Passing Parameters/Generating XML

One of the nice things about using Zeep is that you don’t actually need to write XML, which can be finicky. Create a dictionary with the relevant data, and it will create XML for you, based on an XML schema that you provide it (more on that later). For example, the following dictionary:

request_data = {
    'merchantID': '1234abc',
    'billTo': {
        'street1': '400 Broad Street',
        'city': 'Seattle',
        'state': 'WA',
        'postalCode': '98109',
        'country': 'US',
    },
    'item': [{
        'id': '0',
        'unitPrice': '12.34',
        'quantity': '1',
    }],
    'taxService': {
        'run': "true",
        'nexus': "WA, CA" 
    },
}