New in version 2.2.
XML-RPC is a Remote Procedure Call method that uses XML passed via HTTP as a transport. With it, a client can call methods with parameters on a remote server (the server is named by a URI) and get back structured data. This module supports writing XML-RPC client code; it handles all the details of translating between conformable Python objects and XML on the wire.
The returned instance is a proxy object with methods that can be used to invoke corresponding RPC calls on the remote server. If the remote server supports the introspection API, the proxy can also be used to query the remote server for the methods it supports (service discovery) and fetch other server-associated metadata.
Server instance methods take Python basic types and objects as arguments and return Python basic types and classes. Types that are conformable (e.g. that can be marshalled through XML), include the following (and except where noted, they are unmarshalled as the same Python type):
Name | Meaning |
---|---|
boolean | The True and False constants |
integers | Pass in directly |
floating-point numbers | Pass in directly |
strings | Pass in directly |
arrays | Any Python sequence type containing conformable elements. Arrays are returned as lists |
structures | A Python dictionary. Keys must be strings, values may be any conformable type. |
dates | in seconds since the epoch; pass in an instance of the DateTime wrapper class |
binary data | pass in an instance of the Binary wrapper class |
This is the full set of data types supported by XML-RPC. Method calls may also raise a special Fault instance, used to signal XML-RPC server errors, or ProtocolError used to signal an error in the HTTP/HTTPS transport layer.
See Also: