Python Cookbook

Making an XML-RPC Method Call

Credit: Rael Dornfest, Jeremy Hylton

Problem

You need to make a method call to an XML-RPC server.

Solution

The xmlrpclib package makes writing XML-RPC clients very easy. For example, we can use XML-RPC to access O’Reilly’s Meerkat server and get the five most recent items about Python:

# needs Python 2.2 or xmlrpclib from http://www.pythonware.com/products/xmlrpc/
from xmlrpclib import Server

server = Server("http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/xml-rpc/server.php")

print server.meerkat.getItems(
    {'search': '[Pp]ython', 'num_items': 5, 'descriptions': 0}
)

Discussion

XML-RPC is a simple and lightweight approach to distributed processing. xmlrpclib, which makes it easy to write XML-RPC clients and servers in Python, has been part of the core Python library since Python 2.2, but you can also get it for older releases of Python from http://www.pythonware.com/products/xmlrpc/.

To use xmlrpclib, instantiate a proxy to the server (the ServerProxy class, also known as the Server class for backward compatibility) by passing in the URL to which you want to connect. Then, on that instance, access whatever methods the remote XML-RPC server supplies. In this case, you know that Meerkat supplies a getItems method, so if you call the method of the same name on the server-proxy instance, the instance relays the call to the server and returns the results.

This recipe uses O’Reilly’s Meerkat service, intended for the syndication of contents such as news and product announcements. ...