Identity, PowerShell, Azure, AWS, Okta, infrastructure automation. Documenting what I’m learning.

2 minute read

August 2021

Overview

I have spent the last 2 days attempting and finally succeeding in querying the Workday API for a user by their ID using Python and Zeep and couldn’t find a solid example so have recorded here the solution and the process of getting to it. I am by no means a Python expert and definitely not a Workday expert having only used it as an employee in the past, this is what I came up with and worked.

Script

If you came here just to see how to get going, check out the below script. Details are further down if you’re interested.

Requires the Zeep package to be installed.

pip install zeep

Process

Having not had the ‘joy’ of using a SOAP based API in a long long time, I set off Googling ways to do this with Python. I found the Zeep package so started there then I came across the Workday package but found that it caused an error for me and the project is now archived in GitHub. Going back to Zeep I read this tutorial that got me on my way. I was able to return a list of workers however was still stuck on how to actually specify a particular user.

Reading those posts, and this question on Stack Overflow that shows the required xml and going back to the documentation a lot, I finally managed to figure out what was required to send the request to the SOAP endpoint and get back the correct worker data.

Dumping the wdsl

First thing to do was dump the wdsl using Zeep

workday_url = 'https://<hostname>.workday.com/ccx/service/<tenant>/Human_Resources/v36.2?wsdl' 
python -m zeep  $workday_url >> hr.txt

Then referencing the Workday API docs and the hr.txt I found that Worker_Request_References is used “to retrieve a specific instance(s) of Worker and its associated data.” The parameter name is Worker_Reference and takes the type WorkerObjectID.

Following along with the Zeep docs on datastructures I found we can use the get_type method of the client to create a query. “Most of the times you need to pass nested data to the soap client. These Complex types can be retrieved using the client.get_type() method.”

Referencing the hr.txt wdsl dump I searched for ‘Worker_Request’ and found ‘ns0:Worker_Request_ReferencesType’. Inspecting the object looked like I was on the right track so I added the ID I was looking for as per the docs and tried that but got an exception.

ref_type = client.get_type('ns0:Worker_Request_ReferencesType')
request = ref_type(Worker_Reference='1234')
client.service.Get_Workers(request)

zeep.exceptions.Fault: Validation error occurred. Invalid ID 'type'  attribute: NotSet.  Valid Types: WID

Inspecting the request object I could see that it was kind of right but also missing the type as mentioned in the docs and also in the xml example on the Stack Overflow post and what I had be shown in Workday Studio.

Output of the object in Python

Further down in the Zeep datastructures docs and mentioned in one of the blog posts it shows how to set a nest value so after using the request object as a starting point and some trial and error creating the dictionary that finally worked.

request_dict = { 
    'Worker_Reference': { 
        'ID': { 
            'type': 'Employee_ID', 
            '_value_1': employee_id 
        }, 
        'Descriptor': None 
    }, 
    'Skip_Non_Existing_Instances': None, 
    'Ignore_Invalid_References': None 
}

client.service.Get_Workers(request_dict)

This returned the data for my user in the test instance.

data returned from Workday

Summary

Hopefully this will help someone who is struggling querying the Workday API like I was.

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