On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 01:53:13PM -0500, Greg Ward wrote:
>I'm not clear on what the custom code is here.  Is what the code in the
>function whose name is stored in 'method'?

Correct.  When you do an XML-RPC call, you use a single fixed URL
(usually http://.../RPC2) and the method name and parameters are
POSTed to that URL.

Maybe the grovelling around in locals is too cute.  What if I just
included my rpc() function, that unmarshals the arguments, calls
rpc_process(), and checks for uncaught exceptions?  Then the user
would have to write a function with the signature
rpc_process(method_name, params).  rpc_process() would then almost
always look something like this:

def rpc_process (method_name, params):
    if method_name == 'login':
        user_id, password = params
        return login_func(user_id, password)
    elif method_name == 'method2':
        ...
    elif ...

Boring code, and people might write 200-line rpc_process() functions
containing the code for all of their methods, but that's not our
problem.  Or they can write a smart rpc_process() that uses a
dictionary or grovels through locals, or whatever, and it's also not
our problem.

I think I like this idea.

>I have to believe there's a nice OO design waiting to jump out at you --
>surely you can get away without having to grovel through some other
>scope's locals() -- yecchh.

OO seems like overkill to handle just a list of methods and their
parameters.  I suppose we could use classes for this, like so:

class MyXMLRPCStuff(XMLRPCHandler):
    _q_exports = ['login', ...]

    def login (self, user_id, password):
        return ...

    def ...

RPC2 = MyXMLRPCStuff()

But 'self' doesn't contribute anything useful; the MyXMLRPCStuff
instance doesn't contain any information of interest.

--amk                                                             (www.amk.ca)
We of Faerie are of the wild magic. We are not creatures of spells and
grimoires. We *are* spells, and we are written of in grimoires.
    -- From SANDMAN #52: "Cluracan's Tale"