[Zope-dev] Zope XML-RPC with SQL Methods

[Eric Kidd]

On Wed, Jun 23, 1999 at 11:05:46AM -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
> The short answer is no. (There is a longer answer that is a bit
> more ambiguous, but I'll spare you that. ;)  Really, when doing xml-
> rpc, Zope should not try to use index_html.  I'll fix this.

Thank you. I'd never understand how to fix this. :-)
 
>  - The thing that marshals results need to be able to figure out
>    how to marshal SQL method results.  SQL methods return "result"
>    objects, which are sequences of records. Records are objects that
>    can be treated as mapping objects, sequences, or instances. 
>    Results need to be marshalled as xml-rpc arrays of structs.  I'm
>    not sure what protocols are needed to make this happen.  I'll
>    give this some thought.

Also, watch out for methods which return any of the following:

  ''
  0
  []

Z ORB doesn't like values which evaluate to false, and won't successfully
return them via XML-RPC. This might occur if query results were empty, for
example. I'm trying to figure out how to fix this for XML-RPC without
breaking other parts of Zope.

>  - SQL method expect parameters to be provided by name.  Xml-rpc
>    wants to provide parameters positionally.  SQL methods would need
>    to be changed to handle positional parameters.

I now have a wrapper product which allows positional parameters to be used
from DTML. This is a slight abuse of DTML, but allows XML-RPC wrappers to
be written through the web in the absence of Python TTW.

Cheers,
Eric