New from the King Foo blog there's a tutorial showing how to use complex types in a SOAP request with Zend_Soap, a component of the Zend Framework.

To be able to use complex types with Soap requests, they need to be fully defined in the WSDL file. Zend_Soap can automate this process, if you know how to define those complex types. Let us start without it Zend_Soap's magic and compare it with a fully discovered complex request type afterwards.

In their example, they have a collection of books (objects) that they want to send over to the web service. The code for both the server and client side are included with the WSDL automagically created by the Zend_Soap_Server component. By setting docblock comments on the properties of the Book objects, the SOAP components automatically know what types they are. Their example defines these, and sets up the web service on the other side with a classmap to define where the "tags" information for each book lies.