[R] SSOAP and Rcurl with proxy server

[michael watson (IAH-C)]

Hi

I'm trying to use a bioconductor package (KEGGSOAP) which relies on
Rcurl and SSOAP.

As an example, a function exists:

> list.organisms
function () 
{
    orgs <- matrix(unlist(.SOAP(KEGGserver, "list_organisms", 
        "", action = KEGGaction, xmlns = KEGGxmlns), use.names = FALSE),

        ncol = 2, byrow = TRUE)
    temp <- orgs[, 2]
    names(temp) <- orgs[, 1]
    return(temp)
}

As can be seen, this function uses the .SOAP method from SSOAP.

The function does not work as the .SOAP function times out.  This is
undoubtedly because it is not aware of my proxy server (functions such
as download.file() and getURL() (from RCurl) work fine, although the
latter requires me to specifically pass the proxy argument as
tag=value).  Unfortunately, the SSOAP package seems to have an alarming
lack of documentation on how to make it work with proxy servers.  The
.SOAP function even includes:

"...: name=value arguments to pass to the "

So a bit of a typo there (no problem we all do it).  Anyway, even if I
pass proxy="blah" to .SOAP I still get a time out.

I would really appreciate hearing from someone who has SSOAP, RCurl and
even KEGGSOAP working from behind a firewall and through a proxy server.

Cheers
Mick