A ServerProxy instance is an object that manages communication
with a remote XML-RPC server. The required first argument is a URI (Uniform Resource
Indicator), and will normally be the URL of the server. The optional second argument is a
transport factory instance; by default it is an internal SafeTransport
instance for https: URLs and an internal HTTP Transport instance
otherwise. The optional third argument is an encoding, by default UTF-8. The optional
fourth argument is a debugging flag. If allow_none is true, the Python constant
None will be translated into XML; the default behaviour is for None
to raise a TypeError. This is a commonly-used extension to the
XML-RPC specification, but isn't supported by all clients and servers; see http://ontosys.com/xml-rpc/extensions.html
for a description.
Both the HTTP and HTTPS transports support the URL syntax extension for HTTP Basic
Authentication: http://user:pass@host:port/path. The user:pass
portion will be base64-encoded as an HTTP `Authorization' header, and sent to the remote
server as part of the connection process when invoking an XML-RPC method. You only need to
use this if the remote server requires a Basic Authentication user and password.
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.
ServerProxy 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):
| 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. Note that even though starting with Python 2.2 you can subclass builtin
types, the xmlrpclib module currently does not marshal instances of such subclasses.
When passing strings, characters special to XML such as "<",
">", and "&" will
be automatically escaped. However, it's the caller's responsibility to ensure that the
string is free of characters that aren't allowed in XML, such as the control characters
with ASCII values between 0 and 31; failing to do this will result in an XML-RPC request
that isn't well-formed XML. If you have to pass arbitrary strings via XML-RPC, use the Binary wrapper class described below.
Server is retained as an alias for ServerProxy
for backwards compatibility. New code should use ServerProxy.
