Month: April 2025

Accessing Soap Envelope and body properties in Liquid Templates

Posted on by in Uncategorized

This thing drove me crazy. Batsh!t insane, but it is all better now because I found the solution.

The issue

You need to call a SOAP service that uses XML and you want to use Liquid templates instead of XSLT. You use the SOAP passthru as it is the most flexible way of calling a SOAP service.

The response body might look a little like this:

<Soap:Envelope xmlns:Soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
  <Soap:Body>
    <ns0:PriceList_Response xmlns:ns0="myNamespace">
      <PriceList>
        <companyId>1</companyId>
        <prices>
          <price>
            <productId>QWERTY123</productId>
            <unitPrice>1900.00</unitPrice>
            <currency>EUR</currency>
          </price>
        </prices>
      </PriceList>
    </ns0:PriceList_Response>
  </Soap:Body>
</Soap:Envelope>
XML

You transform the payload into JSON and what to put it thru a Liquid template.

{
  "Soap:Envelope": {
    "@xmlns:Soap": "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/",
    "Soap:Body": {
      "ns0:PriceList_Response": {
        "@xmlns": "myNamespace",
        "PriceList": {
          "companyId": {
            "#text": "1"
          },
          "prices": {
            "price": {
              "productId": "1",
              "unitPrice": "19.00",
              "currency": "DKK"
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}
Liquid

How do you access the price property, in this payload? This will not work:
{{ content.Soap:Envelope.Soap:Body.ns0:PriceList_Response.prices.price.unitPrice }}

That is because the colon is a special char in Liquid templates and I found no way of escaping it.

The solution

{{ content.['Soap:Envelope'].['Soap:Body'].['ns0:PriceList_Response'].prices.price.unitPrice }}

I was so happy not to be insane anymore.

A tip

Accessing properties deep in a document can be quite confusing and unclear if you need to use a string to get property values in your Liquid template. Use the ability to assign an object to a variable. This means that you can get a Liquid template that looks like this. It is used for assigning price using the payload above:

{% assign price = content.['Soap:Envelope'].['Soap:Body'].['ns0:PriceList_Response'].prices.price.unitPrice %}
"prices": [
    {
        "ProdId": "{{price.productId}}",
        "ProdPrice": "{{price.unitPrice}}",
        "Curr": "{{price.currency}}"
    }
]
Liquid