From: Toby Dickenson [mailto:tdickenson@geminidataloggers.com] Sent: Friday, November 05, 1999 3:13 AM To: 'Dan Pierson'; 'zope@zope.org' Subject: RE: [Zope] xmlrpc calls require string results?

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# if a method called by it doesn't return a string. # This is bogus, but: return 'Done'

BTW: all of this appears to me to be true whether or not Squishdot is involved -- I have tested with target methods that are not part of it.

What am I doing wrong here?

Obviously xmlrpclib needs to be able to marshal the return value back to the caller. The xmlrpc spec has no equivalent of the 'None' that results from a returnless function in python, hence the error.

The return values does not have to be a string; just something that xmlrpc understands.

I can understand this in principal, but methods that return simple integers fail. I'd expect xmlrpc to be able to handle them. Also some of the articles in the Byte series talk about passing structures back and forth so I assumed that the xmlrpc support was smart enought to do things like pack a list of ids (i.e. list of strings) as an XML structure on its own. Dan Pierson, Control Technology Corporation