Debugging a SOAP service using xDebug

Is there a way to debug a SOAP service that we publish ideally with integration into an IDE allowing me to step through the code.

Answer

With a bit of inspiration from this article I’ve come up with a solution that allows me to call the service from SoapUI and step through the code in my IDE (PhpStorm).

The key is to alter a part of the WSDL that gets generated, in particular the <soap:address> node. This has a location attribute to which I append ?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=netbeans-xdebug. Clearly the netbeans-xdebug needs to be whatever IDE Key you have set up with you debugging environment.

I do this by capturing the WSDL before it is rendered and performing a preg_replace().

$wsdl = preg_replace('|soap:address location="(.*?)"|','soap:address location="$1' . $ide_key . '"', $wsdl );