2008 October 25 | Dimuthu's Blog

In XML Schema we declare an array or a multiple occurrence of a schema element by setting its maxOccurs attribute to a value greater than 1 or to the value “unbounded” in a case of no maximum boundary.

<xs:element maxOccurs="unbounded"
            minOccurs="0"
            name="params"
            nillable="true"
            type="xs:int"/>

If you generate PHP code to such a schema using wsdl2php tool, you will get a code for the class variable named “params” similar to this.

    /**
     * @var array[0, unbounded] of int
     */
    public $params;

So if you have a variable (say $object) for the object of this class you can fill the “params” field like this,

$object->params = array(1, 5, 8);

This will create the xml with the expected array of elements.

<wrapper>
    <params>1</params>
    <params>5</params>
    <params>8</params>
</wrapper>

Not only for simple types, you can have arrays of complex types too.

<xs:element maxOccurs="unbounded"
            minOccurs="0"
            name="params"
            nillable="true"
            type="tns:MyComplexType"/>

Instead of giving simple integers like earlier case, this time you will feed the “params” variable with an array of PHP objects of ‘MyComplexType’ class.

$obj1 = new MyComplexType();
/* feeding data to obj1 variables */

$obj2 = new MyComplexType();
/* feeding data to obj2 variables */

$obj3 = new MyComplexType();
/* feeding data to obj3 variables */

$object->params = array($obj1, $obj2, $obj3);

This will create a xml containing array of params similar to this,

<wrapper>
    <params>
        <elementx/> <!-- elements in the MyComplexType type -->
        <elementy/>
    </params>
    <params>
        ... <!-- elements in the MyComplexType type -->
    </params>
    <params>
        ... <!-- elements in the MyComplexType type -->
    </params>
</wrapper>