I’m just commenting ’cause you told me to, not ’cause I’m brilliant or anything.
You often have to fully qualify fields for Sugar SOAPiness to work, e.g.
$query = ” username_c like ‘%$keyword%’ or first_name like ‘%$keyword%’ “; //fails unhelpfully saying “Looks like we got no XML document.. ”
$query = ” username_c like ‘%$keyword%’ or `contacts`.first_name like ‘%$keyword%’ “; //works!