Magento XML-RPC customer.create

I ran into an issue where the SOAP API just stopped working. Turns out that http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/ was down, and the SOAP API references it. So, in order to get rid of this additional third party dependency, I have been trying to rewrite our communication bridge using the XML-RPC API instead.

For the past 24 hours I have been fighting with the Magento XML-RPC API, thinking that it was the API that was flaky, but it turns out the issue was with Zend_XmlRpc auto-conversion.

Now for the juicy party. To get the XML request to be correctly formatted you need to force the associative array to be a Zend_XmlRpc_Value::XMLRPC_TYPE_STRUCT and wrap it in an array().

....
// Create new customer
$new_customer = array(
            'firstname'     => $first_name,
            'lastname'      => $last_name,
            'email'         => $email,
            'password_hash' => $password,
            'store_id'      => 0,
            'website_id'    => 0
);

$new_customer_id = $this->client->call('call', array($this->session, 'customer.create', array(Zend_XmlRpc_Value::getXmlRpcValue($new_customer, Zend_XmlRpc_Value::XMLRPC_TYPE_STRUCT))));
....