I have the WSDL description, but only in file form.

Are you sure?

Web-services commonly serve their WSDL from the proxy URL with '?WSDL' appended.

The SOAP::Transport::HTTP::Server subclasses don't make it easy to serve your WSDL from the same service, so what I do is the following:

1. use the HTTP::Request->parse constructor from HTTP::Request to build a request from the raw incoming request, then
2. (depending on the $request->uri) I either:
   • build a response containing WSDL, or
   • pass $request directly to SOAP::Transport::HTTP::Server like this:

          my $soap = SOAP::Transport::HTTP::Server
             -> new(%args) 
             -> dispatch_to(@classes);
          $soap->request($request);
          $soap->handle;
          my $response = $soap->response;
     [download]

Is it necessary that WSDL file be web served? I don't see how to use it as local file, is it possible?

Sure, do something like this:

my $soap = SOAP::WSDL->new();
$soap->wsdl('file:/path/to/file.wsdl'); 
$soap->proxy('http://server/service.cgi');
$soap->wsdlinit(caching => 1);
[download]

Loading from the file saves some time on script startup, using caching saves a lot of work on each request.

Update: Fixed my URLs.

-David