I am seeing numerous users having payload problems with native SOAP extension and NuSOAP, specially when inter-operating with heterogeneous systems.
The best solution is to use WSF/PHP, the Web services framework with XML in-out model in the heart of its implementation, thanks to Apache Axis2/C.
As PHP users, we would be comfortable working with our own data types such as arrays and classes, and let the SOAP engine handle the serialization completely. WSF/PHP is gradually going there. However, in the mean time, if you run into XML request format problems with other implementations such as .NET, Java, etc. you can always use XML mode.
If you consider native PHP SOAP extension, there is no way to trap the XML payload and manipulate it, and some of the serialization behaviors could not be fine tuned at all. But with WSF/PHP, you can, and it is also written in C. So you have the speed that you want over NuSOAP. I have seen users asking on tweaking XML payload format with NuSOAP as well.
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