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.
