Introduction

Sometimes developers need to make a request to some external server and get a response from it. It can be done in order to get shipping rates, for instance. X-Cart has a wrapper around PEAR2 HTTP REQUEST lib that eases such task. This article shows an example of how to create requests to external services via X-Cart.

Implementation

In order to show you the facility of making requests, we do not need a new module as we can show it via external X-Cart script. We create the <X-Cart>/test.php script with the following content: 

<?php
//X-Cart initializtion
require_once 'top.inc.php';

// defining what page we are going to request
$url = 'http://www.x-cart.com';

// creating HTTP Request object with a single param: URL
$request = new \XLite\Core\HTTP\Request($url);

/**
Here are main parameters that can be defined for HTTP Request object

Data submitted in the request
$request->body = $someData;

Request headers
$request->setHeader('header_name', 'header_value');

Request method. GET is default
$request->verb = 'POST';

Setting request timeout value
$request->requestTimeout = 30;
 */

// making request and getting HTTP Response object as a result
$response = $request->sendRequest();

// printing result
var_dump($response->body);

This script makes a request to x-cart.com and then prints HTML code of its main page as a result.