xmlrpclib: how to marshal special instances

[Willi Langenberger]

Hi!


We have an application server (Zope) and make heavy use of
xml-rpc. One problem arised, when we tried to return a zope.DateTime
instance. xmlrpclib (naturally) knows nothing about zope.DateTime and 
marshalls it as instance, which gives a structure (of zope.DateTime
attributes) on the client side (which isnt very usable).

It seems we have two possibilities:

1) Convert all zope.DateTime instances to xmlrpclib.DateTime instances
   in our appserver program. (This would be a burden for every
   appserver programmer.)

2) Tell xmlrpclib how to marshal zope.DateTime instances as
   xmlrpclib.DateTime objects.

We are in favour of 2, and would like to patch Zope, so that
zope.DateTime objects automatically recieve as xmlrpc date types on
the client side.

Schematically:

  import xmlrpclib

  # zope.DateTime must have an "encode" method
  xmlrpclib.WRAPPERS = xmlrpclib.WRAPPERS + (zope.DateTime,)

However, we do not know, if the WRAPPERS tuple is an "official" API,
and if we should use it that way. (We'd like to know before we try to
get a patch into the Zope core...)

Or, are there other (better!) ways to solve the problem (marshal
zope.DateTime as xml-rpc date without modifying xmlrpclib)?


Thanks!


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-- 
Willi.Langenberger at wu-wien.ac.at                Fax: +43/1/31336/9207
Zentrum fuer Informatikdienste, Wirtschaftsuniversitaet Wien, Austria