1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
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3 <!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN"
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9 <title>XML-RPC for PHP</title>
11 <subtitle>version 3.0.0</subtitle>
14 <date>Feb 2, 2014</date>
18 <firstname>Edd</firstname>
20 <surname>Dumbill</surname>
24 <firstname>Gaetano</firstname>
26 <surname>Giunta</surname>
30 <firstname>Miles</firstname>
32 <surname>Lott</surname>
36 <firstname>Justin R.</firstname>
38 <surname>Miller</surname>
42 <firstname>Andres</firstname>
44 <surname>Salomon</surname>
49 <year>1999,2000,2001</year>
51 <holder>Edd Dumbill, Useful Information Company</holder>
55 <para>All rights reserved.</para>
57 <para>Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
58 modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
63 <para>Redistributions of source code must retain the above
64 copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
69 <para>Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above
70 copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
71 disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided
72 with the distribution.</para>
76 <para>Neither the name of the "XML-RPC for PHP" nor the names of
77 its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
78 derived from this software without specific prior written
81 </itemizedlist></para>
83 <para>THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND
84 CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING,
85 BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND
86 FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
87 REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,
88 SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED
89 TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR
90 PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF
91 LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING
92 NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS
93 SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.</para>
97 <chapter id="introduction">
98 <title>Introduction</title>
100 <para>XML-RPC is a format devised by <ulink
101 url="http://www.userland.com/">Userland Software</ulink> for achieving
102 remote procedure call via XML using HTTP as the transport. XML-RPC has its
104 url="http://www.xmlrpc.com/">www.xmlrpc.com</ulink></para>
106 <para>This collection of PHP classes provides a framework for writing
107 XML-RPC clients and servers in PHP.</para>
109 <para>Main goals of the project are ease of use, flexibility and
112 <para>The original author is Edd Dumbill of <ulink
113 url="http://usefulinc.com/">Useful Information Company</ulink>. As of the
114 1.0 stable release, the project was opened to wider involvement and moved
116 url="http://phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net/">SourceForge</ulink>; later, to <ulink
117 url="https://github.com/">Github</ulink></para>
119 <para>A list of XML-RPC implementations for other languages such as Perl
120 and Python can be found on the <ulink
121 url="http://www.xmlrpc.com/">www.xmlrpc.com</ulink> site.</para>
124 <title>Acknowledgements</title>
126 <para>Daniel E. Baumann</para>
128 <para>James Bercegay</para>
130 <para>Leon Blackwell</para>
132 <para>Stephane Bortzmeyer</para>
134 <para>Daniel Convissor</para>
136 <para>Geoffrey T. Dairiki</para>
138 <para>Stefan Esser</para>
140 <para>James Flemer</para>
142 <para>Ernst de Haan</para>
144 <para>Tom Knight</para>
146 <para>Axel Kollmorgen</para>
148 <para>Peter Kocks</para>
150 <para>Daniel Krippner</para>
154 <para>A. Lambert</para>
156 <para>Frederic Lecointre</para>
158 <para>Dan Libby</para>
160 <para>Arnaud Limbourg</para>
162 <para>Ernest MacDougal Campbell III</para>
164 <para>Lukasz Mach</para>
166 <para>Kjartan Mannes</para>
168 <para>Ben Margolin</para>
170 <para>Nicolay Mausz</para>
172 <para>Justin Miller</para>
174 <para>Jan Pfeifer</para>
176 <para>Giancarlo Pinerolo</para>
178 <para>Peter Russel</para>
180 <para>Jean-Jacques Sarton</para>
182 <para>Viliam Simko</para>
184 <para>Idan Sofer</para>
186 <para>Douglas Squirrel</para>
188 <para>Heiko Stübner</para>
190 <para>Anatoly Techtonik</para>
192 <para>Tommaso Trani</para>
194 <para>Eric van der Vlist</para>
196 <para>Christian Wenz</para>
198 <para>Jim Winstead</para>
200 <para>Przemyslaw Wroblewski</para>
202 <para>Bruno Zanetti Melotti</para>
207 <title>What's new</title>
209 <para><emphasis>Note:</emphasis> not all items the following list have
210 (yet) been fully documented, and some might not be present in any other
211 chapter in the manual. To find a more detailed description of new
212 functions and methods please take a look at the source code of the
213 library, which is quite thoroughly commented in javadoc-like form.</para>
221 </itemizedlist></para>
225 <title>3.0.0 beta</title>
227 <para>This is the first release of the library to only support PHP 5.
228 Some legacy code has been removed, and support for features such as
229 exceptions and dateTime objects introduced.</para>
231 <para>The "beta" tag is meant to indicate the fact that the refactoring
232 has been more widespread than in precedent releases and that more
233 changes are likely to be introduced with time - the library is still
234 considered to be production quality.</para>
238 <para>improved: removed all usage of php functions deprecated in
239 php 5.3, usage of assign-by-ref when creating new objects
244 <para>improved: add support for the <ex:nil/> tag used by
245 the apache library, both in input and output</para>
249 <para>improved: add support for <classname>dateTime</classname>
250 objects in both in <function>php_xmlrpc_encode</function> and as
251 parameter for constructor of
252 <classname>xmlrpcval</classname></para>
256 <para>improved: add support for timestamps as parameter for
257 constructor of <classname>xmlrpcval</classname></para>
261 <para>improved: add option 'dates_as_objects' to
262 <function>php_xmlrpc_decode</function> to return
263 <classname>dateTime</classname> objects for xmlrpc
268 <para>improved: add new method
269 <methodname>SetCurlOptions</methodname> to
270 <classname>xmrlpc_client</classname> to allow extra flexibility in
271 tweaking http config, such as explicitly binding to an ip
276 <para>improved: add new method
277 <methodname>SetUserAgent</methodname> to
278 <classname>xmrlpc_client</classname> to to allow having different
279 user-agent http headers</para>
283 <para>improved: add a new member variable in server class to allow
284 fine-tuning of the encoding of returned values when the server is
285 in 'phpvals' mode</para>
289 <para>improved: allow servers in 'xmlrpcvals' mode to also
290 register plain php functions by defining them in the dispatch map
291 with an added option</para>
295 <para>improved: catch exceptions thrown during execution of php
296 functions exposed as methods by the server</para>
300 <para>fixed: bad encoding if same object is encoded twice using
301 php_xmlrpc_encode</para>
303 </itemizedlist></para>
309 <para><emphasis>Note:</emphasis> this might the last release of the
310 library that will support PHP 4. Future releases (if any) should target
311 php 5.0 as minimum supported version.</para>
315 <para>fixed: encoding of utf-8 characters outside of the BMP
320 <para>fixed: character set declarations surrounded by double
321 quotes were not recognized in http headers</para>
325 <para>fixed: be more tolerant in detection of charset in http
330 <para>fixed: fix detection of zlib.output_compression</para>
334 <para>fixed: use feof() to test if socket connections are to be
335 closed instead of the number of bytes read (rare bug when
336 communicating with some servers)</para>
340 <para>fixed: format floating point values using the correct
341 decimal separator even when php locale is set to one that uses
346 <para>fixed: improve robustness of the debugger when parsing weird
347 results from non-compliant servers</para>
351 <para>php warning when receiving 'false' in a bool value</para>
355 <para>improved: allow the add_to_map server method to add docs for
356 single params too</para>
360 <para>improved: added the possibility to wrap for exposure as
361 xmlrpc methods plain php class methods, object methods and even
364 </itemizedlist></para>
372 <para>fixed: work aroung bug in php 5.2.2 which broke support of
373 HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA</para>
377 <para>fixed: is_dir parameter of setCaCertificate() method is
382 <para>fixed: a php warning in xmlrpc_client creator method</para>
386 <para>fixed: parsing of '1e+1' as valid float</para>
390 <para>fixed: allow errorlevel 3 to work when prev. error handler was
391 a static method</para>
395 <para>fixed: usage of client::setcookie() for multiple cookies in
400 <para>improved: support for CP1252 charset is not part or the
401 library but almost possible</para>
405 <para>improved: more info when curl is enabled and debug mode is
416 <para>fixed: debugger errors on php installs with magic_quotes_gpc
421 <para>fixed: support for https connections via proxy</para>
425 <para>fixed: wrap_xmlrpc_method() generated code failed to properly
426 encode php objects</para>
430 <para>improved: slightly faster encoding of data which is internally
435 <para>improved: debugger always generates a 'null' id for jsonrpc if
440 <para>new: debugger can take advantage of a graphical value builder
441 (it has to be downloaded separately, as part of jsxmlrpc package.
442 See Appendix D for more details)</para>
446 <para>new: support for the <NIL/> xmlrpc extension. see below
447 for more details</para>
451 <para>new: server support for the system.getCapabilities xmlrpc
456 <para>new: <function><link
457 linkend="wrap_xmlrpc_method">wrap_xmlrpc_method()</link></function>
458 accepts two new options: debug and return_on_fault</para>
468 <para>The <function>wrap_php_function</function> and
469 <function>wrap_xmlrpc_method</function> functions have been moved
470 out of the base library file <filename>xmlrpc.inc</filename> into
471 a file of their own: <filename>xmlrpc_wrappers.inc</filename>. You
472 will have to include() / require() it in your scripts if you have
473 been using those functions. For increased security, the automatic
474 rebuilding of php object instances out of received xmlrpc structs
475 in <function>wrap_xmlrpc_method()</function> has been disabled
476 (but it can be optionally re-enabled). Both
477 <function>wrap_php_function()</function> and
478 <function>wrap_xmlrpc_method()</function> functions accept many
479 more options to fine tune their behaviour, including one to return
480 the php code to be saved and later used as standalone php
485 <para>The constructor of xmlrpcval() values has seen some internal
486 changes, and it will not throw a php warning anymore when invoked
487 using an unknown xmlrpc type: the error will only be written to
488 php error log. Also <code>new xmlrpcval('true', 'boolean')</code>
489 is not supported anymore</para>
493 <para>The new function
494 <function>php_xmlrpc_decode_xml()</function> will take the xml
495 representation of either an xmlrpc request, response or single
496 value and return the corresponding php-xmlrpc object
501 <para>A new function <function>wrap_xmlrpc_server()</function>has
502 been added, to wrap all (or some) of the methods exposed by a
503 remote xmlrpc server into a php class</para>
507 <para>A new file has been added:
508 <filename>verify_compat.php</filename>, to help users diagnose the
509 level of compliance of their php installation with the
514 <para>Restored compatibility with php 4.0.5 (for those poor souls
515 still stuck on it)</para>
519 <para>Method <methodname>xmlrpc_server->service()</methodname>
520 now returns a value: either the response payload or xmlrpcresp
521 object instance</para>
526 <methodname>xmlrpc_server->add_to_map()</methodname> now
527 accepts xmlrpc methods with no param definitions</para>
531 <para>Documentation for single parameters of exposed methods can
532 be added to the dispatch map (and turned into html docs in
533 conjunction with a future release of the 'extras' package)</para>
537 <para>Full response payload is saved into xmlrpcresp object for
538 further debugging</para>
542 <para>The debugger can now generate code that wraps a remote
543 method into a php function (works for jsonrpc, too); it also has
544 better support for being activated via a single GET call (e.g. for
545 integration into other tools)</para>
549 <para>Stricter parsing of incoming xmlrpc messages: two more
550 invalid cases are now detected (double <literal>data</literal>
551 element inside <literal>array</literal> and
552 <literal>struct</literal>/<literal>array</literal> after scalar
553 inside <literal>value</literal> element)</para>
557 <para>More logging of errors in a lot of situations</para>
561 <para>Javadoc documentation of lib files (almost) complete</para>
565 <para>Many performance tweaks and code cleanups, plus the usual
566 crop of bugs fixed (see NEWS file for complete list of
571 <para>Lib internals have been modified to provide better support
572 for grafting extra functionality on top of it. Stay tuned for
573 future releases of the EXTRAS package (or go read Appendix
576 </itemizedlist></para>
580 <title>2.0 final</title>
584 <para>Added to the client class the possibility to use Digest and
585 NTLM authentication methods (when using the CURL library) for
586 connecting to servers and NTLM for connecting to proxies</para>
590 <para>Added to the client class the possibility to specify
591 alternate certificate files/directories for authenticating the
592 peer with when using HTTPS communication</para>
596 <para>Reviewed all examples and added a new demo file, containing
597 a proxy to forward xmlrpc requests to other servers (useful e.g.
598 for ajax coding)</para>
602 <para>The debugger has been upgraded to reflect the new client
607 <para>All known bugs have been squashed, and the lib is more
608 tolerant than ever of commonly-found mistakes</para>
610 </itemizedlist></para>
614 <title>2.0 Release candidate 3</title>
618 <para>Added to server class the property
619 <property>functions_parameters_type</property>, that allows the
620 server to register plain php functions as xmlrpc methods (i.e.
621 functions that do not take an xmlrpcmsg object as unique
626 <para>let server and client objects serialize calls using a
627 specified character set encoding for the produced xml instead of
628 US-ASCII (ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 supported)</para>
632 <para>let php_xmlrpc_decode accept xmlrpcmsg objects as valid
637 <para>'class::method' syntax is now accepted in the server
642 <para><function>xmlrpc_clent::SetDebug()</function> accepts
643 integer values instead of a boolean value, with debugging level 2
644 adding to the information printed to screen the complete client
647 </itemizedlist></para>
651 <title>2.0 Release candidate 2</title>
655 <para>Added a new property of the client object:
656 <code>xmlrpc_client->return_type</code>, indicating whether
657 calls to the send() method will return xmlrpcresp objects whose
658 value() is an xmlrpcval object, a php value (automatically
659 decoded) or the raw xml received from the server.</para>
663 <para>Added in the extras dir. two new library file:
664 <filename>jsonrpc.inc</filename> and
665 <filename>jsonrpcs.inc</filename> containing new classes that
666 implement support for the json-rpc protocol (alpha quality
671 <para>Added a new client method: <code>setKey($key,
672 $keypass)</code> to be used in HTTPS connections</para>
676 <para>Added a new file containing some benchmarks in the testsuite
679 </itemizedlist></para>
683 <title>2.0 Release candidate 1</title>
687 <para>Support for HTTP proxies (new method:
688 <code>xmlrpc_client::setProxy()</code>)</para>
692 <para>Support HTTP compression of both requests and responses.
693 Clients can specify what kind of compression they accept for
694 responses between deflate/gzip/any, and whether to compress the
695 requests. Servers by default compress responses to clients that
696 explicitly declare support for compression (new methods:
697 <code>xmlrpc_client::setAcceptedCompression()</code>,
698 <code>xmlrpc_client::setRequestCompression()</code>). Note that the
699 ZLIB php extension needs to be enabled in PHP to support
704 <para>Implement HTTP 1.1 connections, but only if CURL is enabled
705 (added an extra parameter to
706 <code>xmlrpc_client::xmlrpc_client</code> to set the desired HTTP
707 protocol at creation time and a new supported value for the last
708 parameter of <code>xmlrpc_client::send</code>, which now can be
709 safely omitted if it has been specified at creation time)</para>
711 <para>With PHP versions greater than 4.3.8 keep-alives are enabled
712 by default for HTTP 1.1 connections. This should yield faster
713 execution times when making multiple calls in sequence to the same
714 xml-rpc server from a single client.</para>
718 <para>Introduce support for cookies. Cookies to be sent to the
719 server with a request can be set using
720 <code>xmlrpc_client::setCookie()</code>, while cookies received from
721 the server are found in <code>xmlrpcresp::cookies()</code>. It is
722 left to the user to check for validity of received cookies and
723 decide whether they apply to successive calls or not.</para>
727 <para>Better support for detecting different character set encodings
728 of xml-rpc requests and responses: both client and server objects
729 will correctly detect the charset encoding of received xml, and use
730 an appropriate xml parser.</para>
732 <para>Supported encodings are US-ASCII, UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1.</para>
736 <para>Added one new xmlrpcmsg constructor syntax, allowing usage of
737 a single string with the complete URL of the target server</para>
741 <para>Convert xml-rpc boolean values into native php values instead
746 <para>Force the <code>php_xmlrpc_encode</code> function to properly
747 encode numerically indexed php arrays into xml-rpc arrays
748 (numerically indexed php arrays always start with a key of 0 and
749 increment keys by values of 1)</para>
753 <para>Prevent the <code>php_xmlrpc_encode</code> function from
754 further re-encoding any objects of class <code>xmlrpcval</code> that
755 are passed to it. This allows to call the function with arguments
756 consisting of mixed php values / xmlrpcval objects.</para>
760 <para>Allow a server to NOT respond to system.* method calls
761 (setting the <code>$server->allow_system_funcs</code>
766 <para>Implement a new xmlrpcval method to determine if a value of
767 type struct has a member of a given name without having to loop
768 trough all members: <code>xmlrpcval::structMemExists()</code></para>
772 <para>Expand methods <code>xmlrpcval::addArray</code>,
773 <code>addScalar</code> and <code>addStruct</code> allowing extra php
774 values to be added to xmlrpcval objects already formed.</para>
778 <para>Let the <code>xmlrpc_client::send</code> method accept an XML
779 string for sending instead of an xmlrpcmsg object, to facilitate
780 debugging and integration with the php native xmlrpc
785 <para>Extend the <code>php_xmlrpc_encode</code> and
786 <code>php_xmlrpc_decode</code> functions to allow serialization and
787 rebuilding of PHP objects. To successfully rebuild a serialized
788 object, the object class must be defined in the deserializing end of
789 the transfer. Note that object members of type resource will be
790 deserialized as NULL values.</para>
792 <para>Note that his has been implemented adding a "php_class"
793 attribute to xml representation of xmlrpcval of STRUCT type, which,
794 strictly speaking, breaks the xml-rpc spec. Other xmlrpc
795 implementations are supposed to ignore such an attribute (unless
796 they implement a brain-dead custom xml parser...), so it should be
797 safe enabling it in heterogeneous environments. The activation of
798 this feature is done by usage of an option passed as second
799 parameter to both <code>php_xmlrpc_encode</code> and
800 <code>php_xmlrpc_decode</code>.</para>
804 <para>Extend the <code>php_xmlrpc_encode</code> function to allow
805 automatic serialization of iso8601-conforming php strings as
806 datetime.iso8601 xmlrpcvals, by usage of an optional
811 <para>Added an automatic stub code generator for converting xmlrpc
812 methods to php functions and vice-versa.</para>
814 <para>This is done via two new functions:
815 <code>wrap_php_function</code> and <code>wrap_xmlrpc_method</code>,
816 and has many caveats, with php being a typeless language and
821 <para>Allow object methods to be used in server dispatch map</para>
825 <para>Added a complete debugger solution, in the
826 <filename>debugger</filename> folder</para>
830 <para>Added configurable server-side debug messages, controlled by
831 the new method <code>xmlrpc_server::SetDebug()</code>. At level 0,
832 no debug messages are sent to the client; level 1 is the same as the
833 old behaviour; at level 2 a lot more info is echoed back to the
834 client, regarding the received call; at level 3 all warnings raised
835 during server processing are trapped (this prevents breaking the xml
836 to be echoed back to the client) and added to the debug info sent
837 back to the client</para>
841 <para>New XML parsing code, yields smaller memory footprint and
842 faster execution times, not to mention complete elimination of the
843 dreaded <filename>eval()</filename> construct, so prone to code
844 injection exploits</para>
848 <para>Rewritten most of the error messages, making text more
855 <chapter id="requirements">
856 <title>System Requirements</title>
858 <para>The library has been designed with goals of scalability and backward
859 compatibility. As such, it supports a wide range of PHP installs. Note
860 that not all features of the lib are available in every
861 configuration.</para>
863 <para>The <emphasis>minimum supported</emphasis> PHP version is
866 <para>If you wish to use SSL or HTTP 1.1 to communicate with remote
867 servers, you need the "curl" extension compiled into your PHP
870 <para>The "xmlrpc" native extension is not required to be compiled into
871 your PHP installation, but if it is, there will be no interference with
872 the operation of this library.</para>
875 <chapter id="manifest">
876 <title>Files in the distribution</title>
880 <glossterm>lib/xmlrpc.inc</glossterm>
883 <para>the XML-RPC classes. <function>include()</function> this in
884 your PHP files to use the classes.</para>
889 <glossterm>lib/xmlrpcs.inc</glossterm>
892 <para>the XML-RPC server class. <function>include()</function> this
893 in addition to xmlrpc.inc to get server functionality</para>
898 <glossterm>lib/xmlrpc_wrappers.inc</glossterm>
901 <para>helper functions to "automagically" convert plain php
902 functions to xmlrpc services and vice versa</para>
907 <glossterm>demo/server/proxy.php</glossterm>
910 <para>a sample server implementing xmlrpc proxy
911 functionality.</para>
916 <glossterm>demo/server/server.php</glossterm>
919 <para>a sample server hosting various demo functions, as well as a
920 full suite of functions used for interoperability testing. It is
921 used by testsuite.php (see below) for unit testing the library, and
922 is not to be copied literally into your production servers</para>
927 <glossterm>demo/client/client.php, demo/client/agesort.php,
928 demo/client/which.php</glossterm>
931 <para>client code to exercise some of the functions in server.php,
932 including the <function>interopEchoTests.whichToolkit</function>
938 <glossterm>demo/client/wrap.php</glossterm>
941 <para>client code to illustrate 'wrapping' of remote methods into
942 php functions.</para>
947 <glossterm>demo/client/introspect.php</glossterm>
950 <para>client code to illustrate usage of introspection capabilities
951 offered by server.php.</para>
956 <glossterm>demo/client/mail.php</glossterm>
959 <para>client code to illustrate usage of an xmlrpc-to-email gateway
960 using Dave Winer's XML-RPC server at userland.com.</para>
965 <glossterm>demo/client/zopetest.php</glossterm>
968 <para>example client code that queries an xmlrpc server built in
974 <glossterm>demo/vardemo.php</glossterm>
977 <para>examples of how to construct xmlrpcval types</para>
982 <glossterm>demo/demo1.txt, demo/demo2.txt, demo/demo3.txt</glossterm>
985 <para>XML-RPC responses captured in a file for testing purposes (you
986 can use these to test the
987 <function>xmlrpcmsg->parseResponse()</function> method).</para>
992 <glossterm>demo/server/discuss.php,
993 demo/client/comment.php</glossterm>
996 <para>Software used in the PHP chapter of <xref
997 linkend="jellyfish" /> to provide a comment server and allow the
998 attachment of comments to stories from Meerkat's data store.</para>
1003 <glossterm>test/testsuite.php, test/parse_args.php</glossterm>
1006 <para>A unit test suite for this software package. If you do
1007 development on this software, please consider submitting tests for
1013 <glossterm>test/benchmark.php</glossterm>
1016 <para>A (very limited) benchmarking suite for this software package.
1017 If you do development on this software, please consider submitting
1018 benchmarks for this suite.</para>
1023 <glossterm>test/phpunit.php, test/PHPUnit/*.php</glossterm>
1026 <para>An (incomplete) version PEAR's unit test framework for PHP.
1027 The complete package can be found at <ulink
1028 url="http://pear.php.net/package/PHPUnit">http://pear.php.net/package/PHPUnit</ulink></para>
1033 <glossterm>test/verify_compat.php</glossterm>
1036 <para>Script designed to help the user to verify the level of
1037 compatibility of the library with the current php install</para>
1042 <glossterm>extras/test.pl, extras/test.py</glossterm>
1045 <para>Perl and Python programs to exercise server.php to test that
1046 some of the methods work.</para>
1051 <glossterm>extras/workspace.testPhpServer.fttb</glossterm>
1054 <para>Frontier scripts to exercise the demo server. Thanks to Dave
1055 Winer for permission to include these. See <ulink
1056 url="http://www.xmlrpc.com/discuss/msgReader$853">Dave's
1057 announcement of these.</ulink></para>
1062 <glossterm>extras/rsakey.pem</glossterm>
1065 <para>A test certificate key for the SSL support, which can be used
1066 to generate dummy certificates. It has the passphrase "test."</para>
1073 <title>Known bugs and limitations</title>
1075 <para>This started out as a bare framework. Many "nice" bits haven't been
1076 put in yet. Specifically, very little type validation or coercion has been
1077 put in. PHP being a loosely-typed language, this is going to have to be
1078 done explicitly (in other words: you can call a lot of library functions
1079 passing them arguments of the wrong type and receive an error message only
1080 much further down the code, where it will be difficult to
1083 <para>dateTime.iso8601 is supported opaquely. It can't be done natively as
1084 the XML-RPC specification explicitly forbids passing of timezone
1085 specifiers in ISO8601 format dates. You can, however, use the <xref
1086 linkend="iso8601encode" /> and <xref linkend="iso8601decode" /> functions
1087 to do the encoding and decoding for you.</para>
1089 <para>Very little HTTP response checking is performed (e.g. HTTP redirects
1090 are not followed and the Content-Length HTTP header, mandated by the
1091 xml-rpc spec, is not validated); cookie support still involves quite a bit
1092 of coding on the part of the user.</para>
1094 <para>If a specific character set encoding other than US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1
1095 or UTF-8 is received in the HTTP header or XML prologue of xml-rpc request
1096 or response messages then it will be ignored for the moment, and the
1097 content will be parsed as if it had been encoded using the charset defined
1098 by <xref linkend="xmlrpc-defencoding" /></para>
1100 <para>Support for receiving from servers version 1 cookies (i.e.
1101 conforming to RFC 2965) is quite incomplete, and might cause unforeseen
1105 <chapter id="support">
1106 <title>Support</title>
1109 <title>Online Support</title>
1111 <para>XML-RPC for PHP is offered "as-is" without any warranty or
1112 commitment to support. However, informal advice and help is available
1113 via the XML-RPC for PHP website and mailing list and from
1118 <para>The <emphasis>XML-RPC for PHP</emphasis> development is hosted
1120 url="https://github.com/gggeek/phpxmlrpc">github.com/gggeek/phpxmlrpc</ulink>.
1121 Bugs, feature requests and patches can be posted to the <ulink
1122 url="https://github.com/gggeek/phpxmlrpc/issues">project's
1123 website</ulink>.</para>
1127 <para>The <emphasis>PHP XML-RPC interest mailing list</emphasis> is
1128 run by the author. More details <ulink
1129 url="http://lists.gnomehack.com/mailman/listinfo/phpxmlrpc">can be
1130 found here</ulink>.</para>
1134 <para>For more general XML-RPC questions, there is a Yahoo! Groups
1135 <ulink url="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xml-rpc/">XML-RPC mailing
1136 list</ulink>.</para>
1141 url="http://www.xmlrpc.com/discuss">XML-RPC.com</ulink> discussion
1142 group is a useful place to get help with using XML-RPC. This group
1143 is also gatewayed into the Yahoo! Groups mailing list.</para>
1148 <sect1 id="jellyfish" xreflabel="The Jellyfish Book">
1149 <title>The Jellyfish Book</title>
1151 <para><graphic align="right" depth="190" fileref="progxmlrpc.s.gif"
1152 format="GIF" width="145" />Together with Simon St.Laurent and Joe
1153 Johnston, Edd Dumbill wrote a book on XML-RPC for O'Reilly and
1154 Associates on XML-RPC. It features a rather fetching jellyfish on the
1157 <para>Complete details of the book are <ulink
1158 url="http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/progxmlrpc/">available from
1159 O'Reilly's web site.</ulink></para>
1161 <para>Edd is responsible for the chapter on PHP, which includes a worked
1162 example of creating a forum server, and hooking it up the O'Reilly's
1163 <ulink url="http://meerkat.oreillynet.com/">Meerkat</ulink> service in
1164 order to allow commenting on news stories from around the Web.</para>
1166 <para>If you've benefited from the effort that has been put into writing
1167 this software, then please consider buying the book!</para>
1171 <chapter id="apidocs">
1172 <title>Class documentation</title>
1174 <sect1 id="xmlrpcval" xreflabel="xmlrpcval">
1175 <title>xmlrpcval</title>
1177 <para>This is where a lot of the hard work gets done. This class enables
1178 the creation and encapsulation of values for XML-RPC.</para>
1180 <para>Ensure you've read the XML-RPC spec at <ulink
1181 url="http://www.xmlrpc.com/stories/storyReader$7">http://www.xmlrpc.com/stories/storyReader$7</ulink>
1182 before reading on as it will make things clearer.</para>
1184 <para>The <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> class can store arbitrarily
1185 complicated values using the following types: <literal>i4 int boolean
1186 string double dateTime.iso8601 base64 array struct</literal>
1187 <literal>null</literal>. You should refer to the <ulink
1188 url="http://www.xmlrpc.com/spec">spec</ulink> for more information on
1189 what each of these types mean.</para>
1192 <title>Notes on types</title>
1197 <para>The type <classname>i4</classname> is accepted as a synonym
1198 for <classname>int</classname> when creating xmlrpcval objects. The
1199 xml parsing code will always convert <classname>i4</classname> to
1200 <classname>int</classname>: <classname>int</classname> is regarded
1201 by this implementation as the canonical name for this type.</para>
1205 <title>base64</title>
1207 <para>Base 64 encoding is performed transparently to the caller when
1208 using this type. Decoding is also transparent. Therefore you ought
1209 to consider it as a "binary" data type, for use when you want to
1210 pass data that is not 7-bit clean.</para>
1214 <title>boolean</title>
1216 <para>The php values <literal>true</literal> and
1217 <literal>1</literal> map to <literal>true</literal>. All other
1218 values (including the empty string) are converted to
1219 <literal>false</literal>.</para>
1223 <title>string</title>
1225 <para>Characters <, >, ', ", &, are encoded using their
1226 entity reference as &lt; &gt; &apos; &quot; and
1227 &amp; All other characters outside of the ASCII range are
1228 encoded using their character reference representation (e.g.
1229 &#200 for é). The XML-RPC spec recommends only encoding
1230 <literal>< &</literal> but this implementation goes further,
1231 for reasons explained by <ulink
1232 url="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#syntax">the XML 1.0
1233 recommendation</ulink>. In particular, using character reference
1234 representation has the advantage of producing XML that is valid
1235 independently of the charset encoding assumed.</para>
1241 <para>There is no support for encoding <literal>null</literal>
1242 values in the XML-RPC spec, but at least a couple of extensions (and
1243 many toolkits) do support it. Before using <literal>null</literal>
1244 values in your messages, make sure that the responding party accepts
1245 them, and uses the same encoding convention (see ...).</para>
1249 <sect2 id="xmlrpcval-creation" xreflabel="xmlrpcval constructors">
1250 <title>Creation</title>
1252 <para>The constructor is the normal way to create an
1253 <classname>xmlrpcval</classname>. The constructor can take these
1258 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcval</type>new
1259 <function>xmlrpcval</function></funcdef>
1265 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcval</type>new
1266 <function>xmlrpcval</function></funcdef>
1268 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$stringVal</parameter></paramdef>
1272 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcval</type>new
1273 <function>xmlrpcval</function></funcdef>
1275 <paramdef><type>mixed</type><parameter>$scalarVal</parameter></paramdef>
1277 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$scalartyp</parameter></paramdef>
1281 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcval</type>new
1282 <function>xmlrpcval</function></funcdef>
1284 <paramdef><type>array</type><parameter>$arrayVal</parameter></paramdef>
1286 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$arraytyp</parameter></paramdef>
1290 <para>The first constructor creates an empty value, which must be
1291 altered using the methods <function>addScalar</function>,
1292 <function>addArray</function> or <function>addStruct</function> before
1293 it can be used.</para>
1295 <para>The second constructor creates a simple string value.</para>
1297 <para>The third constructor is used to create a scalar value. The
1298 second parameter must be a name of an XML-RPC type. Valid types are:
1299 "<literal>int</literal>", "<literal>boolean</literal>",
1300 "<literal>string</literal>", "<literal>double</literal>",
1301 "<literal>dateTime.iso8601</literal>", "<literal>base64</literal>" or
1304 <para>Examples:</para>
1306 <programlisting language="php">
1307 $myInt = new xmlrpcvalue(1267, "int");
1308 $myString = new xmlrpcvalue("Hello, World!", "string");
1309 $myBool = new xmlrpcvalue(1, "boolean");
1310 $myString2 = new xmlrpcvalue(1.24, "string"); // note: this will serialize a php float value as xmlrpc string
1313 <para>The fourth constructor form can be used to compose complex
1314 XML-RPC values. The first argument is either a simple array in the
1315 case of an XML-RPC <classname>array</classname> or an associative
1316 array in the case of a <classname>struct</classname>. The elements of
1317 the array <emphasis>must be <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> objects
1318 themselves</emphasis>.</para>
1320 <para>The second parameter must be either "<literal>array</literal>"
1321 or "<literal>struct</literal>".</para>
1323 <para>Examples:</para>
1325 <programlisting language="php">
1326 $myArray = new xmlrpcval(
1328 new xmlrpcval("Tom"),
1329 new xmlrpcval("Dick"),
1330 new xmlrpcval("Harry")
1335 $myStruct = new xmlrpcval(
1337 "name" => new xmlrpcval("Tom", "string"),
1338 "age" => new xmlrpcval(34, "int"),
1339 "address" => new xmlrpcval(
1341 "street" => new xmlrpcval("Fifht Ave", "string"),
1342 "city" => new xmlrpcval("NY", "string")
1349 <para>See the file <literal>vardemo.php</literal> in this distribution
1350 for more examples.</para>
1353 <sect2 id="xmlrpcval-methods" xreflabel="xmlrpcval methods">
1354 <title>Methods</title>
1357 <title>addScalar</title>
1361 <funcdef><type>int</type><function>addScalar</function></funcdef>
1363 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$stringVal</parameter></paramdef>
1367 <funcdef><type>int</type><function>addScalar</function></funcdef>
1369 <paramdef><type>mixed</type><parameter>$scalarVal</parameter></paramdef>
1371 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$scalartyp</parameter></paramdef>
1375 <para>If <parameter>$val</parameter> is an empty
1376 <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> this method makes it a scalar
1377 value, and sets that value.</para>
1379 <para>If <parameter>$val</parameter> is already a scalar value, then
1380 no more scalars can be added and <literal>0</literal> is
1383 <para>If <parameter>$val</parameter> is an xmlrpcval of type array,
1384 the php value <parameter>$scalarval</parameter> is added as its last
1387 <para>If all went OK, <literal>1</literal> is returned, otherwise
1388 <literal>0</literal>.</para>
1392 <title>addArray</title>
1396 <funcdef><type>int</type><function>addArray</function></funcdef>
1398 <paramdef><type>array</type><parameter>$arrayVal</parameter></paramdef>
1402 <para>The argument is a simple (numerically indexed) array. The
1403 elements of the array <emphasis>must be
1404 <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> objects
1405 themselves</emphasis>.</para>
1407 <para>Turns an empty <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> into an
1408 <classname>array</classname> with contents as specified by
1409 <parameter>$arrayVal</parameter>.</para>
1411 <para>If <parameter>$val</parameter> is an xmlrpcval of type array,
1412 the elements of <parameter>$arrayVal</parameter> are appended to the
1413 existing ones.</para>
1415 <para>See the fourth constructor form for more information.</para>
1417 <para>If all went OK, <literal>1</literal> is returned, otherwise
1418 <literal>0</literal>.</para>
1422 <title>addStruct</title>
1426 <funcdef><type>int</type><function>addStruct</function></funcdef>
1428 <paramdef><type>array</type><parameter>$assocArrayVal</parameter></paramdef>
1432 <para>The argument is an associative array. The elements of the
1433 array <emphasis>must be <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> objects
1434 themselves</emphasis>.</para>
1436 <para>Turns an empty <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> into a
1437 <classname>struct</classname> with contents as specified by
1438 <parameter>$assocArrayVal</parameter>.</para>
1440 <para>If <parameter>$val</parameter> is an xmlrpcval of type struct,
1441 the elements of <parameter>$arrayVal</parameter> are merged with the
1442 existing ones.</para>
1444 <para>See the fourth constructor form for more information.</para>
1446 <para>If all went OK, <literal>1</literal> is returned, otherwise
1447 <literal>0</literal>.</para>
1451 <title>kindOf</title>
1455 <funcdef><type>string</type><function>kindOf</function></funcdef>
1461 <para>Returns a string containing "struct", "array" or "scalar"
1462 describing the base type of the value. If it returns "undef" it
1463 means that the value hasn't been initialised.</para>
1467 <title>serialize</title>
1471 <funcdef><type>string</type><function>serialize</function></funcdef>
1477 <para>Returns a string containing the XML-RPC representation of this
1482 <title>scalarVal</title>
1486 <funcdef><type>mixed</type><function>scalarVal</function></funcdef>
1492 <para>If <function>$val->kindOf() == "scalar"</function>, this
1493 method returns the actual PHP-language value of the scalar (base 64
1494 decoding is automatically handled here).</para>
1498 <title>scalarTyp</title>
1502 <funcdef><type>string</type><function>scalarTyp</function></funcdef>
1508 <para>If <function>$val->kindOf() == "scalar"</function>, this
1509 method returns a string denoting the type of the scalar. As
1510 mentioned before, <literal>i4</literal> is always coerced to
1511 <literal>int</literal>.</para>
1515 <title>arrayMem</title>
1519 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcval</type><function>arrayMem</function></funcdef>
1521 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$n</parameter></paramdef>
1525 <para>If <function>$val->kindOf() == "array"</function>, returns
1526 the <parameter>$n</parameter>th element in the array represented by
1527 the value <parameter>$val</parameter>. The value returned is an
1528 <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> object.</para>
1530 <para><programlisting language="php">
1531 // iterating over values of an array object
1532 for ($i = 0; $i < $val->arraySize(); $i++)
1534 $v = $val->arrayMem($i);
1535 echo "Element $i of the array is of type ".$v->kindOf();
1537 </programlisting></para>
1541 <title>arraySize</title>
1545 <funcdef><type>int</type><function>arraySize</function></funcdef>
1551 <para>If <parameter>$val</parameter> is an
1552 <classname>array</classname>, returns the number of elements in that
1557 <title>structMem</title>
1561 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcval</type><function>structMem</function></funcdef>
1563 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$memberName</parameter></paramdef>
1567 <para>If <function>$val->kindOf() == "struct"</function>, returns
1568 the element called <parameter>$memberName</parameter> from the
1569 struct represented by the value <parameter>$val</parameter>. The
1570 value returned is an <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> object.</para>
1574 <title>structEach</title>
1578 <funcdef><type>array</type><function>structEach</function></funcdef>
1584 <para>Returns the next (key, value) pair from the struct, when
1585 <parameter>$val</parameter> is a struct.
1586 <parameter>$value</parameter> is an xmlrpcval itself. See also <xref
1587 linkend="structreset" />.</para>
1589 <para><programlisting language="php">
1590 // iterating over all values of a struct object
1591 $val->structreset();
1592 while (list($key, $v) = $val->structEach())
1594 echo "Element $key of the struct is of type ".$v->kindOf();
1596 </programlisting></para>
1599 <sect3 id="structreset" xreflabel="structreset()">
1600 <title>structReset</title>
1604 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>structReset</function></funcdef>
1610 <para>Resets the internal pointer for
1611 <function>structEach()</function> to the beginning of the struct,
1612 where <parameter>$val</parameter> is a struct.</para>
1615 <sect3 id="structmemexists" xreflabel="structmemexists()">
1616 <title>structMemExists</title>
1620 <funcdef><type>bool</type><function>structMemExsists</function></funcdef>
1622 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$memberName</parameter></paramdef>
1626 <para>Returns <constant>TRUE</constant> or
1627 <constant>FALSE</constant> depending on whether a member of the
1628 given name exists in the struct.</para>
1633 <sect1 id="xmlrpcmsg" xreflabel="xmlrpcmsg">
1634 <title>xmlrpcmsg</title>
1636 <para>This class provides a representation for a request to an XML-RPC
1637 server. A client sends an <classname>xmlrpcmsg</classname> to a server,
1638 and receives back an <classname>xmlrpcresp</classname> (see <xref
1639 linkend="xmlrpc-client-send" />).</para>
1642 <title>Creation</title>
1644 <para>The constructor takes the following forms:</para>
1648 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcmsg</type>new
1649 <function>xmlrpcmsg</function></funcdef>
1651 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$methodName</parameter></paramdef>
1653 <paramdef><type>array</type><parameter>$parameterArray</parameter><initializer>null</initializer></paramdef>
1657 <para>Where <parameter>methodName</parameter> is a string indicating
1658 the name of the method you wish to invoke, and
1659 <parameter>parameterArray</parameter> is a simple php
1660 <classname>Array</classname> of <classname>xmlrpcval</classname>
1661 objects. Here's an example message to the <emphasis>US state
1662 name</emphasis> server:</para>
1664 <programlisting language="php">
1665 $msg = new xmlrpcmsg("examples.getStateName", array(new xmlrpcval(23, "int")));
1668 <para>This example requests the name of state number 23. For more
1669 information on <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> objects, see <xref
1670 linkend="xmlrpcval" />.</para>
1672 <para>Note that the <parameter>parameterArray</parameter> parameter is
1673 optional and can be omitted for methods that take no input parameters
1674 or if you plan to add parameters one by one.</para>
1678 <title>Methods</title>
1681 <title>addParam</title>
1685 <funcdef><type>bool</type><function>addParam</function></funcdef>
1687 <paramdef><type>xmlrpcval</type><parameter>$xmlrpcVal</parameter></paramdef>
1691 <para>Adds the <classname>xmlrpcval</classname>
1692 <parameter>xmlrpcVal</parameter> to the parameter list for this
1693 method call. Returns TRUE or FALSE on error.</para>
1697 <title>getNumParams</title>
1701 <funcdef><type>int</type><function>getNumParams</function></funcdef>
1707 <para>Returns the number of parameters attached to this
1712 <title>getParam</title>
1716 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcval</type><function>getParam</function></funcdef>
1718 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$n</parameter></paramdef>
1722 <para>Gets the <parameter>n</parameter>th parameter in the message
1723 (with the index zero-based). Use this method in server
1724 implementations to retrieve the values sent by the client.</para>
1728 <title>method</title>
1732 <funcdef><type>string</type><function>method</function></funcdef>
1738 <funcdef><type>string</type><function>method</function></funcdef>
1740 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$methName</parameter></paramdef>
1744 <para>Gets or sets the method contained in the XML-RPC
1749 <title>parseResponse</title>
1753 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcresp</type><function>parseResponse</function></funcdef>
1755 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$xmlString</parameter></paramdef>
1759 <para>Given an incoming XML-RPC server response contained in the
1760 string <parameter>$xmlString</parameter>, this method constructs an
1761 <classname>xmlrpcresp</classname> response object and returns it,
1762 setting error codes as appropriate (see <xref
1763 linkend="xmlrpc-client-send" />).</para>
1765 <para>This method processes any HTTP/MIME headers it finds.</para>
1769 <title>parseResponseFile</title>
1773 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcresp</type><function>parseResponseFile</function></funcdef>
1775 <paramdef><type>file handle
1776 resource</type><parameter>$fileHandle</parameter></paramdef>
1780 <para>Given an incoming XML-RPC server response on the open file
1781 handle <parameter>fileHandle</parameter>, this method reads all the
1782 data it finds and passes it to
1783 <function>parseResponse.</function></para>
1785 <para>This method is useful to construct responses from pre-prepared
1786 files (see files <literal>demo1.txt, demo2.txt, demo3.txt</literal>
1787 in this distribution). It processes any HTTP headers it finds, and
1788 does not close the file handle.</para>
1792 <title>serialize</title>
1796 <funcdef><type>string
1797 </type><function>serialize</function></funcdef>
1803 <para>Returns the an XML string representing the XML-RPC
1809 <sect1 id="xmlrpc-client" xreflabel="xmlrpc_client">
1810 <title>xmlrpc_client</title>
1812 <para>This is the basic class used to represent a client of an XML-RPC
1816 <title>Creation</title>
1818 <para>The constructor accepts one of two possible syntaxes:</para>
1822 <funcdef><type>xmlrpc_client</type>new
1823 <function>xmlrpc_client</function></funcdef>
1825 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$server_url</parameter></paramdef>
1829 <funcdef><type>xmlrpc_client</type>new
1830 <function>xmlrpc_client</function></funcdef>
1832 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$server_path</parameter></paramdef>
1834 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$server_hostname</parameter></paramdef>
1836 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$server_port</parameter><initializer>80</initializer></paramdef>
1838 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$transport</parameter><initializer>'http'</initializer></paramdef>
1842 <para>Here are a couple of usage examples of the first form:</para>
1844 <programlisting language="php">
1845 $client = new xmlrpc_client("http://phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net/server.php");
1846 $another_client = new xmlrpc_client("https://james:bond@secret.service.com:443/xmlrpcserver?agent=007");
1849 <para>The second syntax does not allow to express a username and
1850 password to be used for basic HTTP authorization as in the second
1851 example above, but instead it allows to choose whether xmlrpc calls
1852 will be made using the HTTP 1.0 or 1.1 protocol.</para>
1854 <para>Here's another example client set up to query Userland's XML-RPC
1855 server at <emphasis>betty.userland.com</emphasis>:</para>
1857 <programlisting language="php">
1858 $client = new xmlrpc_client("/RPC2", "betty.userland.com", 80);
1861 <para>The <parameter>server_port</parameter> parameter is optional,
1862 and if omitted will default to 80 when using HTTP and 443 when using
1863 HTTPS (see the <xref linkend="xmlrpc-client-send" /> method
1866 <para>The <parameter>transport</parameter> parameter is optional, and
1867 if omitted will default to 'http'. Allowed values are either
1868 '<symbol>http'</symbol>, '<symbol>https</symbol>' or
1869 '<symbol>http11'</symbol>. Its value can be overridden with every call
1870 to the <methodname>send</methodname> method. See the
1871 <methodname>send</methodname> method below for more details about the
1872 meaning of the different values.</para>
1876 <title>Methods</title>
1878 <para>This class supports the following methods.</para>
1880 <sect3 id="xmlrpc-client-send" xreflabel="xmlrpc_client->send">
1883 <para>This method takes the forms:</para>
1887 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcresp</type><function>send</function></funcdef>
1889 <paramdef><type>xmlrpcmsg</type><parameter>$xmlrpc_message</parameter></paramdef>
1891 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$timeout</parameter></paramdef>
1893 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$transport</parameter></paramdef>
1897 <funcdef><type>array</type><function>send</function></funcdef>
1899 <paramdef><type>array</type><parameter>$xmlrpc_messages</parameter></paramdef>
1901 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$timeout</parameter></paramdef>
1903 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$transport</parameter></paramdef>
1907 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcresp</type><function>send</function></funcdef>
1909 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$xml_payload</parameter></paramdef>
1911 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$timeout</parameter></paramdef>
1913 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$transport</parameter></paramdef>
1917 <para>Where <parameter>xmlrpc_message</parameter> is an instance of
1918 <classname>xmlrpcmsg</classname> (see <xref linkend="xmlrpcmsg" />),
1919 and <parameter>response</parameter> is an instance of
1920 <classname>xmlrpcresp</classname> (see <xref
1921 linkend="xmlrpcresp" />).</para>
1923 <para><parameter>If xmlrpc_messages</parameter> is an array of
1924 message instances, <code>responses</code> will be an array of
1925 response instances. The client will try to make use of a single
1926 <code>system.multicall</code> xml-rpc method call to forward to the
1927 server all the messages in a single HTTP round trip, unless
1928 <code>$client->no_multicall</code> has been previously set to
1929 <code>TRUE</code> (see the multicall method below), in which case
1930 many consecutive xmlrpc requests will be sent.</para>
1932 <para>The third syntax allows to build by hand (or any other means)
1933 a complete xmlrpc request message, and send it to the server.
1934 <parameter>xml_payload</parameter> should be a string containing the
1935 complete xml representation of the request. It is e.g. useful when,
1936 for maximal speed of execution, the request is serialized into a
1937 string using the native php xmlrpc functions (see <ulink
1938 url="http://www.php.net/xmlrpc">the php manual on
1939 xmlrpc</ulink>).</para>
1941 <para>The <parameter>timeout</parameter> is optional, and will be
1942 set to <literal>0</literal> (wait for platform-specific predefined
1943 timeout) if omitted. This timeout value is passed to
1944 <function>fsockopen()</function>. It is also used for detecting
1945 server timeouts during communication (i.e. if the server does not
1946 send anything to the client for <parameter>timeout</parameter>
1947 seconds, the connection will be closed).</para>
1949 <para>The <parameter>transport</parameter> parameter is optional,
1950 and if omitted will default to the transport set using instance
1951 creator or 'http' if omitted. The only other valid values are
1952 'https', which will use an SSL HTTP connection to connect to the
1953 remote server, and 'http11'. Note that your PHP must have the "curl"
1954 extension compiled in order to use both these features. Note that
1955 when using SSL you should normally set your port number to 443,
1956 unless the SSL server you are contacting runs at any other
1960 <para>PHP 4.0.6 has a bug which prevents SSL working.</para>
1963 <para>In addition to low-level errors, the XML-RPC server you were
1964 querying may return an error in the
1965 <classname>xmlrpcresp</classname> object. See <xref
1966 linkend="xmlrpcresp" /> for details of how to handle these
1970 <sect3 id="multicall" xreflabel="xmlrpc_client->multicall">
1971 <title>multiCall</title>
1973 <para>This method takes the form:</para>
1977 <funcdef><type>array</type><function>multiCall</function></funcdef>
1979 <paramdef><type>array</type><parameter>$messages</parameter></paramdef>
1981 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$timeout</parameter></paramdef>
1983 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$transport</parameter></paramdef>
1985 <paramdef><type>bool</type><parameter>$fallback</parameter></paramdef>
1989 <para>This method is used to boxcar many method calls in a single
1990 xml-rpc request. It will try first to make use of the
1991 <code>system.multicall</code> xml-rpc method call, and fall back to
1992 executing many separate requests if the server returns any
1995 <para><parameter>msgs</parameter> is an array of
1996 <classname>xmlrpcmsg</classname> objects (see <xref
1997 linkend="xmlrpcmsg" />), and <parameter>response</parameter> is an
1998 array of <classname>xmlrpcresp</classname> objects (see <xref
1999 linkend="xmlrpcresp" />).</para>
2001 <para>The <parameter>timeout</parameter> and
2002 <parameter>transport</parameter> parameters are optional, and behave
2003 as in the <methodname>send</methodname> method above.</para>
2005 <para>The <parameter>fallback</parameter> parameter is optional, and
2006 defaults to <constant>TRUE</constant>. When set to
2007 <constant>FALSE</constant> it will prevent the client to try using
2008 many single method calls in case of failure of the first multicall
2009 request. It should be set only when the server is known to support
2010 the multicall extension.</para>
2014 <title>setAcceptedCompression</title>
2018 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>setAcceptedCompression</function></funcdef>
2020 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$compressionmethod</parameter></paramdef>
2024 <para>This method defines whether the client will accept compressed
2025 xml payload forming the bodies of the xmlrpc responses received from
2026 servers. Note that enabling reception of compressed responses merely
2027 adds some standard http headers to xmlrpc requests. It is up to the
2028 xmlrpc server to return compressed responses when receiving such
2029 requests. Allowed values for
2030 <parameter>compressionmethod</parameter> are: 'gzip', 'deflate',
2031 'any' or null (with any meaning either gzip or deflate).</para>
2033 <para>This requires the "zlib" extension to be enabled in your php
2034 install. If it is, by default <classname>xmlrpc_client</classname>
2035 instances will enable reception of compressed content.</para>
2039 <title>setCaCertificate</title>
2043 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>setCaCertificate</function></funcdef>
2045 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$certificate</parameter></paramdef>
2047 <paramdef><type>bool</type><parameter>$is_dir</parameter></paramdef>
2051 <para>This method sets an optional certificate to be used in
2052 SSL-enabled communication to validate a remote server with (when the
2053 <parameter>server_method</parameter> is set to 'https' in the
2054 client's construction or in the send method and
2055 <methodname>SetSSLVerifypeer</methodname> has been set to
2056 <constant>TRUE</constant>).</para>
2058 <para>The <parameter>certificate</parameter> parameter must be the
2059 filename of a PEM formatted certificate, or a directory containing
2060 multiple certificate files. The <parameter>is_dir</parameter>
2061 parameter defaults to <constant>FALSE</constant>, set it to
2062 <constant>TRUE</constant> to specify that
2063 <parameter>certificate</parameter> indicates a directory instead of
2064 a single file.</para>
2066 <para>This requires the "curl" extension to be compiled into your
2067 installation of PHP. For more details see the man page for the
2068 <function>curl_setopt</function> function.</para>
2072 <title>setCertificate</title>
2076 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>setCertificate</function></funcdef>
2078 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$certificate</parameter></paramdef>
2080 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$passphrase</parameter></paramdef>
2084 <para>This method sets the optional certificate and passphrase used
2085 in SSL-enabled communication with a remote server (when the
2086 <parameter>server_method</parameter> is set to 'https' in the
2087 client's construction or in the send method).</para>
2089 <para>The <parameter>certificate</parameter> parameter must be the
2090 filename of a PEM formatted certificate. The
2091 <parameter>passphrase</parameter> parameter must contain the
2092 password required to use the certificate.</para>
2094 <para>This requires the "curl" extension to be compiled into your
2095 installation of PHP. For more details see the man page for the
2096 <function>curl_setopt</function> function.</para>
2098 <para>Note: to retrieve information about the client certificate on
2099 the server side, you will need to look into the environment
2100 variables which are set up by the webserver. Different webservers
2101 will typically set up different variables.</para>
2105 <title>setCookie</title>
2109 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>setCookie</function></funcdef>
2111 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$name</parameter></paramdef>
2113 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$value</parameter></paramdef>
2115 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$path</parameter></paramdef>
2117 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$domain</parameter></paramdef>
2119 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$port</parameter></paramdef>
2123 <para>This method sets a cookie that will be sent to the xmlrpc
2124 server along with every further request (useful e.g. for keeping
2125 session info outside of the xml-rpc payload).</para>
2127 <para><parameter>$value</parameter> is optional, and defaults to
2130 <para><parameter>$path, $domain and $port</parameter> are optional,
2131 and will be omitted from the cookie header if unspecified. Note that
2132 setting any of these values will turn the cookie into a 'version 1'
2133 cookie, that might not be fully supported by the server (see RFC2965
2134 for more details).</para>
2138 <title>setCredentials</title>
2142 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>setCredentials</function></funcdef>
2144 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$username</parameter></paramdef>
2146 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$password</parameter></paramdef>
2148 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$authtype</parameter></paramdef>
2152 <para>This method sets the username and password for authorizing the
2153 client to a server. With the default (HTTP) transport, this
2154 information is used for HTTP Basic authorization. Note that username
2155 and password can also be set using the class constructor. With HTTP
2156 1.1 and HTTPS transport, NTLM and Digest authentication protocols
2157 are also supported. To enable them use the constants
2158 <constant>CURLAUTH_DIGEST</constant> and
2159 <constant>CURLAUTH_NTLM</constant> as values for the authtype
2164 <title>setCurlOptions</title>
2166 <para><funcsynopsis>
2168 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>setCurlOptions</function></funcdef>
2170 <paramdef><type>array</type><parameter>$options</parameter></paramdef>
2172 </funcsynopsis>This method allows to directly set any desired
2173 option to manipulate the usage of the cURL client (when in cURL
2174 mode). It can be used eg. to explicitly bind to an outgoing ip
2175 address when the server is multihomed</para>
2179 <title>setDebug</title>
2183 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>setDebug</function></funcdef>
2185 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$debugLvl</parameter></paramdef>
2189 <para><parameter>debugLvl</parameter> is either <literal>0,
2190 1</literal> or 2 depending on whether you require the client to
2191 print debugging information to the browser. The default is not to
2192 output this information (0).</para>
2194 <para>The debugging information at level 1includes the raw data
2195 returned from the XML-RPC server it was querying (including bot HTTP
2196 headers and the full XML payload), and the PHP value the client
2197 attempts to create to represent the value returned by the server. At
2198 level2, the complete payload of the xmlrpc request is also printed,
2199 before being sent t the server.</para>
2201 <para>This option can be very useful when debugging servers as it
2202 allows you to see exactly what the client sends and the server
2207 <title>setKey</title>
2211 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>setKey</function></funcdef>
2213 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$key</parameter></paramdef>
2215 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$keypass</parameter></paramdef>
2219 <para>This method sets the optional certificate key and passphrase
2220 used in SSL-enabled communication with a remote server (when the
2221 <parameter>transport</parameter> is set to 'https' in the client's
2222 construction or in the send method).</para>
2224 <para>This requires the "curl" extension to be compiled into your
2225 installation of PHP. For more details see the man page for the
2226 <function>curl_setopt</function> function.</para>
2230 <title>setProxy</title>
2234 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>setProxy</function></funcdef>
2236 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$proxyhost</parameter></paramdef>
2238 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$proxyport</parameter></paramdef>
2240 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$proxyusername</parameter></paramdef>
2242 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$proxypassword</parameter></paramdef>
2244 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$authtype</parameter></paramdef>
2248 <para>This method enables calling servers via an HTTP proxy. The
2249 <parameter>proxyusername</parameter>,<parameter>
2250 proxypassword</parameter> and <parameter>authtype</parameter>
2251 parameters are optional. <parameter>Authtype</parameter> defaults to
2252 <constant>CURLAUTH_BASIC</constant> (Basic authentication protocol);
2253 the only other valid value is the constant
2254 <constant>CURLAUTH_NTLM</constant>, and has effect only when the
2255 client uses the HTTP 1.1 protocol.</para>
2257 <para>NB: CURL versions before 7.11.10 cannot use a proxy to
2258 communicate with https servers.</para>
2262 <title>setRequestCompression</title>
2266 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>setRequestCompression</function></funcdef>
2268 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$compressionmethod</parameter></paramdef>
2272 <para>This method defines whether the xml payload forming the
2273 request body will be sent to the server in compressed format, as per
2274 the HTTP specification. This is particularly useful for large
2275 request parameters and over slow network connections. Allowed values
2276 for <parameter>compressionmethod</parameter> are: 'gzip', 'deflate',
2277 'any' or null (with any meaning either gzip or deflate). Note that
2278 there is no automatic fallback mechanism in place for errors due to
2279 servers not supporting receiving compressed request bodies, so make
2280 sure that the particular server you are querying does accept
2281 compressed requests before turning it on.</para>
2283 <para>This requires the "zlib" extension to be enabled in your php
2288 <title>setSSLVerifyHost</title>
2292 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>setSSLVerifyHost</function></funcdef>
2294 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$i</parameter></paramdef>
2298 <para>This method defines whether connections made to XML-RPC
2299 backends via HTTPS should verify the remote host's SSL certificate's
2300 common name (CN). By default, only the existence of a CN is checked.
2301 <parameter><parameter>$i</parameter></parameter> should be an
2302 integer value; 0 to not check the CN at all, 1 to merely check for
2303 its existence, and 2 to check that the CN on the certificate matches
2304 the hostname that is being connected to.</para>
2308 <title>setSSLVerifyPeer</title>
2312 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>setSSLVerifyPeer</function></funcdef>
2314 <paramdef><type>bool</type><parameter>$i</parameter></paramdef>
2318 <para>This method defines whether connections made to XML-RPC
2319 backends via HTTPS should verify the remote host's SSL certificate,
2320 and cause the connection to fail if the cert verification fails.
2321 <parameter><parameter>$i</parameter></parameter> should be a boolean
2322 value. Default value: <constant>TRUE</constant>. To specify custom
2323 SSL certificates to validate the server with, use the
2324 <methodname>setCaCertificate</methodname> method.</para>
2328 <title>setUserAgent</title>
2330 <para><funcsynopsis>
2332 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>Useragent</function></funcdef>
2334 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$useragent</parameter></paramdef>
2336 </funcsynopsis>This method sets a custom user-agent that will be
2337 used by the client in the http headers sent with the request. The
2338 default value is built using the library name and version
2344 <title>Variables</title>
2346 <para>NB: direct manipulation of these variables is only recommended
2347 for advanced users.</para>
2350 <title>no_multicall</title>
2352 <para>This member variable determines whether the multicall() method
2353 will try to take advantage of the system.multicall xmlrpc method to
2354 dispatch to the server an array of requests in a single http
2355 roundtrip or simply execute many consecutive http calls. Defaults to
2356 FALSE, but it will be enabled automatically on the first failure of
2357 execution of system.multicall.</para>
2361 <title>request_charset_encoding</title>
2363 <para>This is the charset encoding that will be used for serializing
2364 request sent by the client.</para>
2366 <para>If defaults to NULL, which means using US-ASCII and encoding
2367 all characters outside of the ASCII range using their xml character
2368 entity representation (this has the benefit that line end characters
2369 will not be mangled in the transfer, a CR-LF will be preserved as
2370 well as a singe LF).</para>
2372 <para>Valid values are 'US-ASCII', 'UTF-8' and 'ISO-8859-1'</para>
2375 <sect3 id="return-type" xreflabel="return_type">
2376 <title>return_type</title>
2378 <para>This member variable determines whether the value returned
2379 inside an xmlrpcresp object as results of calls to the send() and
2380 multicall() methods will be an xmlrpcval object, a plain php value
2381 or a raw xml string. Allowed values are 'xmlrpcvals' (the default),
2382 'phpvals' and 'xml'. To allow the user to differentiate between a
2383 correct and a faulty response, fault responses will be returned as
2384 xmlrpcresp objects in any case. Note that the 'phpvals' setting will
2385 yield faster execution times, but some of the information from the
2386 original response will be lost. It will be e.g. impossible to tell
2387 whether a particular php string value was sent by the server as an
2388 xmlrpc string or base64 value.</para>
2390 <para>Example usage:</para>
2392 <programlisting language="php">
2393 $client = new xmlrpc_client("phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net/server.php");
2394 $client->return_type = 'phpvals';
2395 $message = new xmlrpcmsg("examples.getStateName", array(new xmlrpcval(23, "int")));
2396 $resp = $client->send($message);
2397 if ($resp->faultCode()) echo 'KO. Error: '.$resp->faultString(); else echo 'OK: got '.$resp->value();
2400 <para>For more details about usage of the 'xml' value, see Appendix
2406 <sect1 id="xmlrpcresp" xreflabel="xmlrpcresp">
2407 <title>xmlrpcresp</title>
2409 <para>This class is used to contain responses to XML-RPC requests. A
2410 server method handler will construct an
2411 <classname>xmlrpcresp</classname> and pass it as a return value. This
2412 same value will be returned by the result of an invocation of the
2413 <function>send</function> method of the
2414 <classname>xmlrpc_client</classname> class.</para>
2417 <title>Creation</title>
2421 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcresp</type>new
2422 <function>xmlrpcresp</function></funcdef>
2424 <paramdef><type>xmlrpcval</type><parameter>$xmlrpcval</parameter></paramdef>
2428 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcresp</type>new
2429 <function>xmlrpcresp</function></funcdef>
2431 <paramdef><parameter>0</parameter></paramdef>
2433 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$errcode</parameter></paramdef>
2435 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$err_string</parameter></paramdef>
2439 <para>The first syntax is used when execution has happened without
2440 difficulty: <parameter>$xmlrpcval</parameter> is an
2441 <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> value with the result of the method
2442 execution contained in it. Alternatively it can be a string containing
2443 the xml serialization of the single xml-rpc value result of method
2446 <para>The second type of constructor is used in case of failure.
2447 <parameter>errcode</parameter> and <parameter>err_string</parameter>
2448 are used to provide indication of what has gone wrong. See <xref
2449 linkend="xmlrpc-server" /> for more information on passing error
2454 <title>Methods</title>
2457 <title>faultCode</title>
2461 <funcdef><type>int</type><function>faultCode</function></funcdef>
2467 <para>Returns the integer fault code return from the XML-RPC
2468 response. A zero value indicates success, any other value indicates
2469 a failure response.</para>
2473 <title>faultString</title>
2477 <funcdef><type>string</type><function>faultString</function></funcdef>
2483 <para>Returns the human readable explanation of the fault indicated
2484 by <function>$resp->faultCode</function>().</para>
2488 <title>value</title>
2492 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcval</type><function>value</function></funcdef>
2498 <para>Returns an <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> object containing
2499 the return value sent by the server. If the response's
2500 <function>faultCode</function> is non-zero then the value returned
2501 by this method should not be used (it may not even be an
2504 <para>Note: if the xmlrpcresp instance in question has been created
2505 by an <classname>xmlrpc_client</classname> object whose
2506 <varname>return_type</varname> was set to 'phpvals', then a plain
2507 php value will be returned instead of an
2508 <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> object. If the
2509 <varname>return_type</varname> was set to 'xml', an xml string will
2510 be returned (see the return_type member var above for more
2515 <title>serialize</title>
2519 <funcdef><type>string</type><function>serialize</function></funcdef>
2525 <para>Returns an XML string representation of the response (xml
2526 prologue not included).</para>
2531 <sect1 id="xmlrpc-server" xreflabel="xmlrpc_server">
2532 <title>xmlrpc_server</title>
2534 <para>The implementation of this class has been kept as simple to use as
2535 possible. The constructor for the server basically does all the work.
2536 Here's a minimal example:</para>
2538 <programlisting language="php">
2539 function foo ($xmlrpcmsg) {
2541 return new xmlrpcresp($some_xmlrpc_val);
2545 function foobar($xmlrpcmsg) {
2547 return new xmlrpcresp($some_xmlrpc_val);
2551 $s = new xmlrpc_server(
2553 "examples.myFunc1" => array("function" => "foo"),
2554 "examples.myFunc2" => array("function" => "bar::foobar"),
2558 <para>This performs everything you need to do with a server. The single
2559 constructor argument is an associative array from xmlrpc method names to
2560 php function names. The incoming request is parsed and dispatched to the
2561 relevant php function, which is responsible for returning a
2562 <classname>xmlrpcresp</classname> object, that will be serialized back
2563 to the caller.</para>
2566 <title>Method handler functions</title>
2568 <para>Both php functions and class methods can be registered as xmlrpc
2569 method handlers.</para>
2571 <para>The synopsis of a method handler function is:</para>
2573 <para><synopsis>xmlrpcresp $resp = function (xmlrpcmsg $msg)</synopsis></para>
2575 <para>No text should be echoed 'to screen' by the handler function, or
2576 it will break the xml response sent back to the client. This applies
2577 also to error and warning messages that PHP prints to screen unless
2578 the appropriate parameters have been set in the php.in file. Another
2579 way to prevent echoing of errors inside the response and facilitate
2580 debugging is to use the server SetDebug method with debug level 3 (see
2581 ...). Exceptions thrown duting execution of handler functions are
2582 caught by default and a XML-RPC error reponse is generated instead.
2583 This behaviour can be finetuned by usage of the
2584 <varname>exception_handling</varname> member variable (see
2587 <para>Note that if you implement a method with a name prefixed by
2588 <code>system.</code> the handler function will be invoked by the
2589 server with two parameters, the first being the server itself and the
2590 second being the <classname>xmlrpcmsg</classname> object.</para>
2592 <para>The same php function can be registered as handler of multiple
2593 xmlrpc methods.</para>
2595 <para>Here is a more detailed example of what the handler function
2596 <function>foo</function> may do:</para>
2598 <programlisting language="php">
2599 function foo ($xmlrpcmsg) {
2600 global $xmlrpcerruser; // import user errcode base value
2602 $meth = $xmlrpcmsg->method(); // retrieve method name
2603 $par = $xmlrpcmsg->getParam(0); // retrieve value of first parameter - assumes at least one param received
2604 $val = $par->scalarval(); // decode value of first parameter - assumes it is a scalar value
2609 // this is an error condition
2610 return new xmlrpcresp(0, $xmlrpcerruser+1, // user error 1
2611 "There's a problem, Captain");
2613 // this is a successful value being returned
2614 return new xmlrpcresp(new xmlrpcval("All's fine!", "string"));
2619 <para>See <filename>server.php</filename> in this distribution for
2620 more examples of how to do this.</para>
2622 <para>Since release 2.0RC3 there is a new, even simpler way of
2623 registering php functions with the server. See section 5.7
2628 <title>The dispatch map</title>
2630 <para>The first argument to the <function>xmlrpc_server</function>
2631 constructor is an array, called the <emphasis>dispatch map</emphasis>.
2632 In this array is the information the server needs to service the
2633 XML-RPC methods you define.</para>
2635 <para>The dispatch map takes the form of an associative array of
2636 associative arrays: the outer array has one entry for each method, the
2637 key being the method name. The corresponding value is another
2638 associative array, which can have the following members:</para>
2642 <para><function><literal>function</literal></function> - this
2643 entry is mandatory. It must be either a name of a function in the
2644 global scope which services the XML-RPC method, or an array
2645 containing an instance of an object and a static method name (for
2646 static class methods the 'class::method' syntax is also
2651 <para><function><literal>signature</literal></function> - this
2652 entry is an array containing the possible signatures (see <xref
2653 linkend="signatures" />) for the method. If this entry is present
2654 then the server will check that the correct number and type of
2655 parameters have been sent for this method before dispatching
2660 <para><function><literal>docstring</literal></function> - this
2661 entry is a string containing documentation for the method. The
2662 documentation may contain HTML markup.</para>
2666 <para><literal>signature_docs</literal> - this entry can be used
2667 to provide documentation for the single parameters. It must match
2668 in structure the 'signature' member. By default, only the
2669 <classname>documenting_xmlrpc_server</classname> class in the
2670 extras package will take advantage of this, since the
2671 "system.methodHelp" protocol does not support documenting method
2672 parameters individually.</para>
2676 <para><literal>parameters_type</literal> - this entry can be used
2677 when the server is working in 'xmlrpcvals' mode (see ...) to
2678 define one or more entries in the dispatch map as being functions
2679 that follow the 'phpvals' calling convention. The only useful
2680 value is currently the string <literal>phpvals</literal>.</para>
2684 <para>Look at the <filename>server.php</filename> example in the
2685 distribution to see what a dispatch map looks like.</para>
2688 <sect2 id="signatures" xreflabel="Signatures">
2689 <title>Method signatures</title>
2691 <para>A signature is a description of a method's return type and its
2692 parameter types. A method may have more than one signature.</para>
2694 <para>Within a server's dispatch map, each method has an array of
2695 possible signatures. Each signature is an array of types. The first
2696 entry is the return type. For instance, the method <programlisting
2697 language="php">string examples.getStateName(int)
2698 </programlisting> has the signature <programlisting language="php">array($xmlrpcString, $xmlrpcInt)
2699 </programlisting> and, assuming that it is the only possible signature for the
2700 method, it might be used like this in server creation: <programlisting
2702 $findstate_sig = array(array($xmlrpcString, $xmlrpcInt));
2704 $findstate_doc = 'When passed an integer between 1 and 51 returns the
2705 name of a US state, where the integer is the index of that state name
2706 in an alphabetic order.';
2708 $s = new xmlrpc_server( array(
2709 "examples.getStateName" => array(
2710 "function" => "findstate",
2711 "signature" => $findstate_sig,
2712 "docstring" => $findstate_doc
2714 </programlisting></para>
2716 <para>Note that method signatures do not allow to check nested
2717 parameters, e.g. the number, names and types of the members of a
2718 struct param cannot be validated.</para>
2720 <para>If a method that you want to expose has a definite number of
2721 parameters, but each of those parameters could reasonably be of
2722 multiple types, the array of acceptable signatures will easily grow
2723 into a combinatorial explosion. To avoid such a situation, the lib
2724 defines the global var <varname>$xmlrpcValue</varname>, which can be
2725 used in method signatures as a placeholder for 'any xmlrpc
2728 <para><programlisting language="php">
2729 $echoback_sig = array(array($xmlrpcValue, $xmlrpcValue));
2731 $findstate_doc = 'Echoes back to the client the received value, regardless of its type';
2733 $s = new xmlrpc_server( array(
2734 "echoBack" => array(
2735 "function" => "echoback",
2736 "signature" => $echoback_sig, // this sig guarantees that the method handler will be called with one and only one parameter
2737 "docstring" => $echoback_doc
2739 </programlisting></para>
2741 <para>Methods <methodname>system.listMethods</methodname>,
2742 <methodname>system.methodHelp</methodname>,
2743 <methodname>system.methodSignature</methodname> and
2744 <methodname>system.multicall</methodname> are already defined by the
2745 server, and should not be reimplemented (see Reserved Methods
2750 <title>Delaying the server response</title>
2752 <para>You may want to construct the server, but for some reason not
2753 fulfill the request immediately (security verification, for instance).
2754 If you omit to pass to the constructor the dispatch map or pass it a
2755 second argument of <literal>0</literal> this will have the desired
2756 effect. You can then use the <function>service()</function> method of
2757 the server class to service the request. For example:</para>
2759 <programlisting language="php">
2760 $s = new xmlrpc_server($myDispMap, 0); // second parameter = 0 prevents automatic servicing of request
2762 // ... some code that does other stuff here
2767 <para>Note that the <methodname>service</methodname> method will print
2768 the complete result payload to screen and send appropriate HTTP
2769 headers back to the client, but also return the response object. This
2770 permits further manipulation of the response, possibly in combination
2771 with output buffering.</para>
2773 <para>To prevent the server from sending HTTP headers back to the
2774 client, you can pass a second parameter with a value of
2775 <literal>TRUE</literal> to the <methodname>service</methodname>
2776 method. In this case, the response payload will be returned instead of
2777 the response object.</para>
2779 <para>Xmlrpc requests retrieved by other means than HTTP POST bodies
2780 can also be processed. For example:</para>
2782 <programlisting language="php">
2783 $s = new xmlrpc_server(); // not passing a dispatch map prevents automatic servicing of request
2785 // ... some code that does other stuff here, including setting dispatch map into server object
2787 $resp = $s->service($xmlrpc_request_body, true); // parse a variable instead of POST body, retrieve response payload
2789 // ... some code that does other stuff with xml response $resp here
2794 <title>Modifying the server behaviour</title>
2796 <para>A couple of methods / class variables are available to modify
2797 the behaviour of the server. The only way to take advantage of their
2798 existence is by usage of a delayed server response (see above)</para>
2801 <title>setDebug()</title>
2803 <para>This function controls weather the server is going to echo
2804 debugging messages back to the client as comments in response body.
2805 Valid values: 0,1,2,3, with 1 being the default. At level 0, no
2806 debug info is returned to the client. At level 2, the complete
2807 client request is added to the response, as part of the xml
2808 comments. At level 3, a new PHP error handler is set when executing
2809 user functions exposed as server methods, and all non-fatal errors
2810 are trapped and added as comments into the response.</para>
2814 <title>allow_system_funcs</title>
2816 <para>Default_value: TRUE. When set to FALSE, disables support for
2817 <methodname>System.xxx</methodname> functions in the server. It
2818 might be useful e.g. if you do not wish the server to respond to
2819 requests to <methodname>System.ListMethods</methodname>.</para>
2823 <title>compress_response</title>
2825 <para>When set to TRUE, enables the server to take advantage of HTTP
2826 compression, otherwise disables it. Responses will be transparently
2827 compressed, but only when an xmlrpc-client declares its support for
2828 compression in the HTTP headers of the request.</para>
2830 <para>Note that the ZLIB php extension must be installed for this to
2831 work. If it is, <varname>compress_response</varname> will default to
2836 <title>exception_handling</title>
2838 <para>This variable controls the behaviour of the server when an
2839 exception is thrown by a method handler php function. Valid values:
2840 0,1,2, with 0 being the default. At level 0, the server catches the
2841 exception and return an 'internal error' xmlrpc response; at 1 it
2842 catches the exceptions and return an xmlrpc response with the error
2843 code and error message corresponding to the exception that was
2844 thron; at 2 = the exception is floated to the upper layers in the
2849 <title>response_charset_encoding</title>
2851 <para>Charset encoding to be used for response (only affects string
2854 <para>If it can, the server will convert the generated response from
2855 internal_encoding to the intended one.</para>
2857 <para>Valid values are: a supported xml encoding (only UTF-8 and
2858 ISO-8859-1 at present, unless mbstring is enabled), null (leave
2859 charset unspecified in response and convert output stream to
2860 US_ASCII), 'default' (use xmlrpc library default as specified in
2861 xmlrpc.inc, convert output stream if needed), or 'auto' (use
2862 client-specified charset encoding or same as request if request
2863 headers do not specify it (unless request is US-ASCII: then use
2864 library default anyway).</para>
2869 <title>Fault reporting</title>
2871 <para>Fault codes for your servers should start at the value indicated
2872 by the global <literal>$xmlrpcerruser</literal> + 1.</para>
2874 <para>Standard errors returned by the server include:</para>
2878 <term><literal>1</literal> <phrase>Unknown method</phrase></term>
2881 <para>Returned if the server was asked to dispatch a method it
2882 didn't know about</para>
2887 <term><literal>2</literal> <phrase>Invalid return
2888 payload</phrase></term>
2891 <para>This error is actually generated by the client, not
2892 server, code, but signifies that a server returned something it
2893 couldn't understand. A more detailed error report is sometimes
2894 added onto the end of the phrase above.</para>
2899 <term><literal>3</literal> <phrase>Incorrect
2900 parameters</phrase></term>
2903 <para>This error is generated when the server has signature(s)
2904 defined for a method, and the parameters passed by the client do
2905 not match any of signatures.</para>
2910 <term><literal>4</literal> <phrase>Can't introspect: method
2911 unknown</phrase></term>
2914 <para>This error is generated by the builtin
2915 <function>system.*</function> methods when any kind of
2916 introspection is attempted on a method undefined by the
2922 <term><literal>5</literal> <phrase>Didn't receive 200 OK from
2923 remote server</phrase></term>
2926 <para>This error is generated by the client when a remote server
2927 doesn't return HTTP/1.1 200 OK in response to a request. A more
2928 detailed error report is added onto the end of the phrase
2934 <term><literal>6</literal> <phrase>No data received from
2935 server</phrase></term>
2938 <para>This error is generated by the client when a remote server
2939 returns HTTP/1.1 200 OK in response to a request, but no
2940 response body follows the HTTP headers.</para>
2945 <term><literal>7</literal> <phrase>No SSL support compiled
2949 <para>This error is generated by the client when trying to send
2950 a request with HTTPS and the CURL extension is not available to
2956 <term><literal>8</literal> <phrase>CURL error</phrase></term>
2959 <para>This error is generated by the client when trying to send
2960 a request with HTTPS and the HTTPS communication fails.</para>
2965 <term><literal>9-14</literal> <phrase>multicall
2966 errors</phrase></term>
2969 <para>These errors are generated by the server when something
2970 fails inside a system.multicall request.</para>
2975 <term><literal>100-</literal> <phrase>XML parse
2976 errors</phrase></term>
2979 <para>Returns 100 plus the XML parser error code for the fault
2980 that occurred. The <function>faultString</function> returned
2981 explains where the parse error was in the incoming XML
2989 <title>'New style' servers</title>
2991 <para>In the same spirit of simplification that inspired the
2992 <varname>xmlrpc_client::return_type</varname> class variable, a new
2993 class variable has been added to the server class:
2994 <varname>functions_parameters_type</varname>. When set to 'phpvals',
2995 the functions registered in the server dispatch map will be called
2996 with plain php values as parameters, instead of a single xmlrpcmsg
2997 instance parameter. The return value of those functions is expected to
2998 be a plain php value, too. An example is worth a thousand
2999 words:<programlisting language="php">
3000 function foo($usr_id, $out_lang='en') {
3001 global $xmlrpcerruser;
3005 if ($someErrorCondition)
3006 return new xmlrpcresp(0, $xmlrpcerruser+1, 'DOH!');
3011 'picture' => new xmlrpcval(file_get_contents($picOfTheGuy), 'base64')
3015 $s = new xmlrpc_server(
3017 "examples.myFunc" => array(
3018 "function" => "bar::foobar",
3019 "signature" => array(
3020 array($xmlrpcString, $xmlrpcInt),
3021 array($xmlrpcString, $xmlrpcInt, $xmlrpcString)
3025 $s->functions_parameters_type = 'phpvals';
3027 </programlisting>There are a few things to keep in mind when using this
3028 simplified syntax:</para>
3030 <para>to return an xmlrpc error, the method handler function must
3031 return an instance of <classname>xmlrpcresp</classname>. The only
3032 other way for the server to know when an error response should be
3033 served to the client is to throw an exception and set the server's
3034 <varname>exception_handling</varname> memeber var to 1;</para>
3036 <para>to return a base64 value, the method handler function must
3037 encode it on its own, creating an instance of an xmlrpcval
3040 <para>the method handler function cannot determine the name of the
3041 xmlrpc method it is serving, unlike standard handler functions that
3042 can retrieve it from the message object;</para>
3044 <para>when receiving nested parameters, the method handler function
3045 has no way to distinguish a php string that was sent as base64 value
3046 from one that was sent as a string value;</para>
3048 <para>this has a direct consequence on the support of
3049 system.multicall: a method whose signature contains datetime or base64
3050 values will not be available to multicall calls;</para>
3052 <para>last but not least, the direct parsing of xml to php values is
3053 much faster than using xmlrpcvals, and allows the library to handle
3054 much bigger messages without allocating all available server memory or
3055 smashing PHP recursive call stack.</para>
3060 <chapter id="globalvars">
3061 <title>Global variables</title>
3063 <para>Many global variables are defined in the xmlrpc.inc file. Some of
3064 those are meant to be used as constants (and modifying their value might
3065 cause unpredictable behaviour), while some others can be modified in your
3066 php scripts to alter the behaviour of the xml-rpc client and
3070 <title>"Constant" variables</title>
3073 <title>$xmlrpcerruser</title>
3075 <para><fieldsynopsis>
3076 <varname>$xmlrpcerruser</varname>
3078 <initializer>800</initializer>
3079 </fieldsynopsis>The minimum value for errors reported by user
3080 implemented XML-RPC servers. Error numbers lower than that are
3081 reserved for library usage.</para>
3085 <title>$xmlrpcI4, $xmlrpcInt, $xmlrpcBoolean, $xmlrpcDouble,
3086 $xmlrpcString, $xmlrpcDateTime, $xmlrpcBase64, $xmlrpcArray,
3087 $xmlrpcStruct, $xmlrpcValue, $xmlrpcNull</title>
3089 <para>For convenience the strings representing the XML-RPC types have
3090 been encoded as global variables:<programlisting language="php">
3093 $xmlrpcBoolean="boolean";
3094 $xmlrpcDouble="double";
3095 $xmlrpcString="string";
3096 $xmlrpcDateTime="dateTime.iso8601";
3097 $xmlrpcBase64="base64";
3098 $xmlrpcArray="array";
3099 $xmlrpcStruct="struct";
3100 $xmlrpcValue="undefined";
3102 </programlisting></para>
3106 <title>$xmlrpcTypes, $xmlrpc_valid_parents, $xmlrpcerr, $xmlrpcstr,
3107 $xmlrpcerrxml, $xmlrpc_backslash, $_xh, $xml_iso88591_Entities,
3108 $xmlEntities, $xmlrpcs_capabilities</title>
3110 <para>Reserved for internal usage.</para>
3115 <title>Variables whose value can be modified</title>
3117 <sect2 id="xmlrpc-defencoding" xreflabel="xmlrpc_defencoding">
3118 <title xreflabel="">xmlrpc_defencoding</title>
3121 <varname>$xmlrpc_defencoding</varname>
3123 <initializer>"UTF8"</initializer>
3126 <para>This variable defines the character set encoding that will be
3127 used by the xml-rpc client and server to decode the received messages,
3128 when a specific charset declaration is not found (in the messages sent
3129 non-ascii chars are always encoded using character references, so that
3130 the produced xml is valid regardless of the charset encoding
3133 <para>Allowed values: <literal>"UTF8"</literal>,
3134 <literal>"ISO-8859-1"</literal>, <literal>"ASCII".</literal></para>
3136 <para>Note that the appropriate RFC actually mandates that XML
3137 received over HTTP without indication of charset encoding be treated
3138 as US-ASCII, but many servers and clients 'in the wild' violate the
3139 standard, and assume the default encoding is UTF-8.</para>
3143 <title>xmlrpc_internalencoding</title>
3145 <para><fieldsynopsis>
3146 <varname>$xmlrpc_internalencoding</varname>
3148 <initializer>"ISO-8859-1"</initializer>
3149 </fieldsynopsis>This variable defines the character set encoding
3150 that the library uses to transparently encode into valid XML the
3151 xml-rpc values created by the user and to re-encode the received
3152 xml-rpc values when it passes them to the PHP application. It only
3153 affects xml-rpc values of string type. It is a separate value from
3154 xmlrpc_defencoding, allowing e.g. to send/receive xml messages encoded
3155 on-the-wire in US-ASCII and process them as UTF-8. It defaults to the
3156 character set used internally by PHP (unless you are running an
3157 MBString-enabled installation), so you should change it only in
3158 special situations, if e.g. the string values exchanged in the xml-rpc
3159 messages are directly inserted into / fetched from a database
3160 configured to return UTF8 encoded strings to PHP. Example
3163 <para><programlisting language="php">
3166 include('xmlrpc.inc');
3167 $xmlrpc_internalencoding = 'UTF-8'; // this has to be set after the inclusion above
3168 $v = new xmlrpcval('κόÏ
\83με'); // This xmlrpc value will be correctly serialized as the greek word 'kosme'
3169 </programlisting></para>
3173 <title>xmlrpcName</title>
3175 <para><fieldsynopsis>
3176 <varname>$xmlrpcName</varname>
3178 <initializer>"XML-RPC for PHP"</initializer>
3179 </fieldsynopsis>The string representation of the name of the XML-RPC
3180 for PHP library. It is used by the client for building the User-Agent
3181 HTTP header that is sent with every request to the server. You can
3182 change its value if you need to customize the User-Agent
3187 <title>xmlrpcVersion</title>
3189 <para><fieldsynopsis>
3190 <varname>$xmlrpcVersion</varname>
3192 <initializer>"2.2"</initializer>
3193 </fieldsynopsis>The string representation of the version number of
3194 the XML-RPC for PHP library in use. It is used by the client for
3195 building the User-Agent HTTP header that is sent with every request to
3196 the server. You can change its value if you need to customize the
3197 User-Agent string.</para>
3201 <title>xmlrpc_null_extension</title>
3203 <para>When set to <constant>TRUE</constant>, the lib will enable
3204 support for the <NIL/> (and <EX:NIL/>) xmlrpc value, as
3205 per the extension to the standard proposed here. This means that
3206 <NIL/> and <EX:NIL/> tags received will be parsed as valid
3207 xmlrpc, and the corresponding xmlrpcvals will return "null" for
3208 <methodname>scalarTyp()</methodname>.</para>
3212 <title>xmlrpc_null_apache_encoding</title>
3214 <para>When set to <literal>TRUE</literal>, php NULL values encoded
3215 into <classname>xmlrpcval</classname> objects get serialized using the
3216 <literal><EX:NIL/></literal> tag instead of
3217 <literal><NIL/></literal>. Please note that both forms are
3218 always accepted as input regardless of the value of this
3224 <chapter id="helpers">
3225 <title>Helper functions</title>
3227 <para>XML-RPC for PHP contains some helper functions which you can use to
3228 make processing of XML-RPC requests easier.</para>
3231 <title>Date functions</title>
3233 <para>The XML-RPC specification has this to say on dates:</para>
3236 <para id="wrap_xmlrpc_method">Don't assume a timezone. It should be
3237 specified by the server in its documentation what assumptions it makes
3238 about timezones.</para>
3241 <para>Unfortunately, this means that date processing isn't
3242 straightforward. Although XML-RPC uses ISO 8601 format dates, it doesn't
3243 use the timezone specifier.</para>
3245 <para>We strongly recommend that in every case where you pass dates in
3246 XML-RPC calls, you use UTC (GMT) as your timezone. Most computer
3247 languages include routines for handling GMT times natively, and you
3248 won't have to translate between timezones.</para>
3250 <para>For more information about dates, see <ulink
3251 url="http://www.uic.edu/year2000/datefmt.html">ISO 8601: The Right
3252 Format for Dates</ulink>, which has a handy link to a PDF of the ISO
3253 8601 specification. Note that XML-RPC uses exactly one of the available
3254 representations: CCYYMMDDTHH:MM:SS.</para>
3256 <sect2 id="iso8601encode" xreflabel="iso8601_encode()">
3257 <title>iso8601_encode</title>
3261 <funcdef><type>string</type><function>iso8601_encode</function></funcdef>
3263 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$time_t</parameter></paramdef>
3266 choice="opt"><type>int</type><parameter>$utc</parameter><initializer>0</initializer></paramdef>
3270 <para>Returns an ISO 8601 formatted date generated from the UNIX
3271 timestamp <parameter>$time_t</parameter>, as returned by the PHP
3272 function <function>time()</function>.</para>
3274 <para>The argument <parameter>$utc</parameter> can be omitted, in
3275 which case it defaults to <literal>0</literal>. If it is set to
3276 <literal>1</literal>, then the function corrects the time passed in
3277 for UTC. Example: if you're in the GMT-6:00 timezone and set
3278 <parameter>$utc</parameter>, you will receive a date representation
3279 six hours ahead of your local time.</para>
3281 <para>The included demo program <filename>vardemo.php</filename>
3282 includes a demonstration of this function.</para>
3285 <sect2 id="iso8601decode" xreflabel="iso8601_decode()">
3286 <title>iso8601_decode</title>
3290 <funcdef><type>int</type><function>iso8601_decode</function></funcdef>
3292 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$isoString</parameter></paramdef>
3294 <paramdef><type>int</type><parameter>$utc</parameter><initializer>0</initializer></paramdef>
3298 <para>Returns a UNIX timestamp from an ISO 8601 encoded time and date
3299 string passed in. If <parameter>$utc</parameter> is
3300 <literal>1</literal> then <parameter>$isoString</parameter> is assumed
3301 to be in the UTC timezone, and thus the result is also UTC: otherwise,
3302 the timezone is assumed to be your local timezone and you receive a
3303 local timestamp.</para>
3307 <sect1 id="arrayuse">
3308 <title>Easy use with nested PHP values</title>
3310 <para>Dan Libby was kind enough to contribute two helper functions that
3311 make it easier to translate to and from PHP values. This makes it easier
3312 to deal with complex structures. At the moment support is limited to
3313 <type>int</type>, <type>double</type>, <type>string</type>,
3314 <type>array</type>, <type>datetime</type> and <type>struct</type>
3315 datatypes; note also that all PHP arrays are encoded as structs, except
3316 arrays whose keys are integer numbers starting with 0 and incremented by
3319 <para>These functions reside in <filename>xmlrpc.inc</filename>.</para>
3321 <sect2 id="phpxmlrpcdecode">
3322 <title>php_xmlrpc_decode</title>
3326 <funcdef><type>mixed</type><function>php_xmlrpc_decode</function></funcdef>
3328 <paramdef><type>xmlrpcval</type><parameter>$xmlrpc_val</parameter></paramdef>
3330 <paramdef><type>array</type><parameter>$options</parameter></paramdef>
3334 <funcdef><type>array</type><function>php_xmlrpc_decode</function></funcdef>
3336 <paramdef><type>xmlrpcmsg</type><parameter>$xmlrpcmsg_val</parameter></paramdef>
3338 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$options</parameter></paramdef>
3342 <para>Returns a native PHP value corresponding to the values found in
3343 the <type>xmlrpcval</type> <parameter>$xmlrpc_val</parameter>,
3344 translated into PHP types. Base-64 and datetime values are
3345 automatically decoded to strings.</para>
3347 <para>In the second form, returns an array containing the parameters
3349 <parameter><classname>xmlrpcmsg</classname>_val</parameter>, decoded
3350 to php types.</para>
3352 <para>The <parameter>options</parameter> parameter is optional. If
3353 specified, it must consist of an array of options to be enabled in the
3354 decoding process. At the moment the only valid option are
3355 <symbol>decode_php_objs</symbol> and
3356 <literal>dates_as_objects</literal>. When the first is set, php
3357 objects that have been converted to xml-rpc structs using the
3358 <function>php_xmlrpc_encode</function> function and a corresponding
3359 encoding option will be converted back into object values instead of
3360 arrays (provided that the class definition is available at
3361 reconstruction time). When the second is set, XML-RPC datetime values
3362 will be converted into native <classname>dateTime</classname> objects
3363 instead of strings.</para>
3365 <para><emphasis><emphasis>WARNING</emphasis>:</emphasis> please take
3366 extreme care before enabling the <symbol>decode_php_objs</symbol>
3367 option: when php objects are rebuilt from the received xml, their
3368 constructor function will be silently invoked. This means that you are
3369 allowing the remote end to trigger execution of uncontrolled PHP code
3370 on your server, opening the door to code injection exploits. Only
3371 enable this option when you have complete trust of the remote
3372 server/client.</para>
3374 <para>Example:<programlisting language="php">
3375 // wrapper to expose an existing php function as xmlrpc method handler
3376 function foo_wrapper($m)
3378 $params = php_xmlrpc_decode($m);
3379 $retval = call_user_func_array('foo', $params);
3380 return new xmlrpcresp(new xmlrpcval($retval)); // foo return value will be serialized as string
3383 $s = new xmlrpc_server(array(
3384 "examples.myFunc1" => array(
3385 "function" => "foo_wrapper",
3386 "signatures" => ...
3388 </programlisting></para>
3391 <sect2 id="phpxmlrpcencode">
3392 <title>php_xmlrpc_encode</title>
3396 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcval</type><function>php_xmlrpc_encode</function></funcdef>
3398 <paramdef><type>mixed</type><parameter>$phpval</parameter></paramdef>
3400 <paramdef><type>array</type><parameter>$options</parameter></paramdef>
3404 <para>Returns an <type>xmlrpcval</type> object populated with the PHP
3405 values in <parameter>$phpval</parameter>. Works recursively on arrays
3406 and objects, encoding numerically indexed php arrays into array-type
3407 xmlrpcval objects and non numerically indexed php arrays into
3408 struct-type xmlrpcval objects. Php objects are encoded into
3409 struct-type xmlrpcvals, excepted for php values that are already
3410 instances of the xmlrpcval class or descendants thereof, which will
3411 not be further encoded. Note that there's no support for encoding php
3412 values into base-64 values. Encoding of date-times is optionally
3413 carried on on php strings with the correct format.</para>
3415 <para>The <parameter>options</parameter> parameter is optional. If
3416 specified, it must consist of an array of options to be enabled in the
3417 encoding process. At the moment the only valid options are
3418 <symbol>encode_php_objs</symbol>, <literal>null_extension</literal>
3419 and <symbol>auto_dates</symbol>.</para>
3421 <para>The first will enable the creation of 'particular' xmlrpcval
3422 objects out of php objects, that add a "php_class" xml attribute to
3423 their serialized representation. This attribute allows the function
3424 php_xmlrpc_decode to rebuild the native php objects (provided that the
3425 same class definition exists on both sides of the communication). The
3426 second allows to encode php <literal>NULL</literal> values to the
3427 <literal><NIL/></literal> (or
3428 <literal><EX:NIL/></literal>, see ...) tag. The last encodes any
3429 string that matches the ISO8601 format into an XML-RPC
3432 <para>Example:<programlisting language="php">
3433 // the easy way to build a complex xml-rpc struct, showing nested base64 value and datetime values
3434 $val = php_xmlrpc_encode(array(
3435 'first struct_element: an int' => 666,
3436 'second: an array' => array ('apple', 'orange', 'banana'),
3437 'third: a base64 element' => new xmlrpcval('hello world', 'base64'),
3438 'fourth: a datetime' => '20060107T01:53:00'
3439 ), array('auto_dates'));
3440 </programlisting></para>
3444 <title>php_xmlrpc_decode_xml</title>
3448 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcval | xmlrpcresp |
3449 xmlrpcmsg</type><function>php_xmlrpc_decode_xml</function></funcdef>
3451 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$xml</parameter></paramdef>
3453 <paramdef><type>array</type><parameter>$options</parameter></paramdef>
3457 <para>Decodes the xml representation of either an xmlrpc request,
3458 response or single value, returning the corresponding php-xmlrpc
3459 object, or <literal>FALSE</literal> in case of an error.</para>
3461 <para>The <parameter>options</parameter> parameter is optional. If
3462 specified, it must consist of an array of options to be enabled in the
3463 decoding process. At the moment, no option is supported.</para>
3465 <para>Example:<programlisting language="php">
3466 $text = '<value><array><data><value>Hello world</value></data></array></value>';
3467 $val = php_xmlrpc_decode_xml($text);
3468 if ($val) echo 'Found a value of type '.$val->kindOf(); else echo 'Found invalid xml';
3469 </programlisting></para>
3474 <title>Automatic conversion of php functions into xmlrpc methods (and
3477 <para>For the extremely lazy coder, helper functions have been added
3478 that allow to convert a php function into an xmlrpc method, and a
3479 remotely exposed xmlrpc method into a local php function - or a set of
3480 methods into a php class. Note that these comes with many caveat.</para>
3483 <title>wrap_xmlrpc_method</title>
3487 <funcdef><type>string</type><function>wrap_xmlrpc_method</function></funcdef>
3489 <paramdef>$client</paramdef>
3491 <paramdef>$methodname</paramdef>
3493 <paramdef>$extra_options</paramdef>
3497 <funcdef><type>string</type><function>wrap_xmlrpc_method</function></funcdef>
3499 <paramdef>$client</paramdef>
3501 <paramdef>$methodname</paramdef>
3503 <paramdef>$signum</paramdef>
3505 <paramdef>$timeout</paramdef>
3507 <paramdef>$protocol</paramdef>
3509 <paramdef>$funcname</paramdef>
3513 <para>Given an xmlrpc server and a method name, creates a php wrapper
3514 function that will call the remote method and return results using
3515 native php types for both params and results. The generated php
3516 function will return an xmlrpcresp object for failed xmlrpc
3519 <para>The second syntax is deprecated, and is listed here only for
3520 backward compatibility.</para>
3522 <para>The server must support the
3523 <methodname>system.methodSignature</methodname> xmlrpc method call for
3524 this function to work.</para>
3526 <para>The <parameter>client</parameter> param must be a valid
3527 xmlrpc_client object, previously created with the address of the
3528 target xmlrpc server, and to which the preferred communication options
3529 have been set.</para>
3531 <para>The optional parameters can be passed as array key,value pairs
3532 in the <parameter>extra_options</parameter> param.</para>
3534 <para>The <parameter>signum</parameter> optional param has the purpose
3535 of indicating which method signature to use, if the given server
3536 method has multiple signatures (defaults to 0).</para>
3538 <para>The <parameter>timeout</parameter> and
3539 <parameter>protocol</parameter> optional params are the same as in the
3540 <methodname>xmlrpc_client::send()</methodname> method.</para>
3542 <para>If set, the optional <parameter>new_function_name</parameter>
3543 parameter indicates which name should be used for the generated
3544 function. In case it is not set the function name will be
3545 auto-generated.</para>
3547 <para>If the <literal>return_source</literal> optional parameter is
3548 set, the function will return the php source code to build the wrapper
3549 function, instead of evaluating it (useful to save the code and use it
3550 later as stand-alone xmlrpc client).</para>
3552 <para>If the <literal>encode_php_objs</literal> optional parameter is
3553 set, instances of php objects later passed as parameters to the newly
3554 created function will receive a 'special' treatment that allows the
3555 server to rebuild them as php objects instead of simple arrays. Note
3556 that this entails using a "slightly augmented" version of the xmlrpc
3557 protocol (ie. using element attributes), which might not be understood
3558 by xmlrpc servers implemented using other libraries.</para>
3560 <para>If the <literal>decode_php_objs</literal> optional parameter is
3561 set, instances of php objects that have been appropriately encoded by
3562 the server using a coordinate option will be deserialized as php
3563 objects instead of simple arrays (the same class definition should be
3564 present server side and client side).</para>
3566 <para><emphasis>Note that this might pose a security risk</emphasis>,
3567 since in order to rebuild the object instances their constructor
3568 method has to be invoked, and this means that the remote server can
3569 trigger execution of unforeseen php code on the client: not really a
3570 code injection, but almost. Please enable this option only when you
3571 trust the remote server.</para>
3573 <para>In case of an error during generation of the wrapper function,
3574 FALSE is returned, otherwise the name (or source code) of the new
3577 <para>Known limitations: server must support
3578 <methodname>system.methodsignature</methodname> for the wanted xmlrpc
3579 method; for methods that expose multiple signatures, only one can be
3580 picked; for remote calls with nested xmlrpc params, the caller of the
3581 generated php function has to encode on its own the params passed to
3582 the php function if these are structs or arrays whose (sub)members
3583 include values of type base64.</para>
3585 <para>Note: calling the generated php function 'might' be slow: a new
3586 xmlrpc client is created on every invocation and an xmlrpc-connection
3587 opened+closed. An extra 'debug' param is appended to the parameter
3588 list of the generated php function, useful for debugging
3591 <para>Example usage:</para>
3593 <programlisting language="php">
3594 $c = new xmlrpc_client('http://phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net/server.php');
3596 $function = wrap_xmlrpc_method($client, 'examples.getStateName');
3599 die('Cannot introspect remote method');
3602 $statename = $function($a);
3603 if (is_a($statename, 'xmlrpcresp')) // call failed
3605 echo 'Call failed: '.$statename->faultCode().'. Calling again with debug on';
3606 $function($a, true);
3609 echo "OK, state nr. $stateno is $statename";
3614 <sect2 id="wrap_php_function">
3615 <title>wrap_php_function</title>
3619 <funcdef><type>array</type><function>wrap_php_function</function></funcdef>
3621 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$funcname</parameter></paramdef>
3623 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$wrapper_function_name</parameter></paramdef>
3625 <paramdef><type>array</type><parameter>$extra_options</parameter></paramdef>
3629 <para>Given a user-defined PHP function, create a PHP 'wrapper'
3630 function that can be exposed as xmlrpc method from an xmlrpc_server
3631 object and called from remote clients, and return the appropriate
3632 definition to be added to a server's dispatch map.</para>
3634 <para>The optional <parameter>$wrapper_function_name</parameter>
3635 specifies the name that will be used for the auto-generated
3638 <para>Since php is a typeless language, to infer types of input and
3639 output parameters, it relies on parsing the javadoc-style comment
3640 block associated with the given function. Usage of xmlrpc native types
3641 (such as datetime.dateTime.iso8601 and base64) in the docblock @param
3642 tag is also allowed, if you need the php function to receive/send data
3643 in that particular format (note that base64 encoding/decoding is
3644 transparently carried out by the lib, while datetime vals are passed
3645 around as strings).</para>
3647 <para>Known limitations: only works for
3648 user-defined functions, not for PHP internal functions (reflection
3649 does not support retrieving number/type of params for those); the
3650 wrapped php function will not be able to programmatically return an
3651 xmlrpc error response.</para>
3653 <para>If the <literal>return_source</literal> optional parameter is
3654 set, the function will return the php source code to build the wrapper
3655 function, instead of evaluating it (useful to save the code and use it
3656 later in a stand-alone xmlrpc server). It will be in the stored in the
3657 <literal>source</literal> member of the returned array.</para>
3659 <para>If the <literal>suppress_warnings</literal> optional parameter
3660 is set, any runtime warning generated while processing the
3661 user-defined php function will be catched and not be printed in the
3662 generated xml response.</para>
3664 <para>If the <parameter>extra_options</parameter> array contains the
3665 <literal>encode_php_objs</literal> value, wrapped functions returning
3666 php objects will generate "special" xmlrpc responses: when the xmlrpc
3667 decoding of those responses is carried out by this same lib, using the
3668 appropriate param in php_xmlrpc_decode(), the objects will be
3671 <para>In short: php objects can be serialized, too (except for their
3672 resource members), using this function. Other libs might choke on the
3673 very same xml that will be generated in this case (i.e. it has a
3674 nonstandard attribute on struct element tags)</para>
3676 <para>If the <literal>decode_php_objs</literal> optional parameter is
3677 set, instances of php objects that have been appropriately encoded by
3678 the client using a coordinate option will be deserialized and passed
3679 to the user function as php objects instead of simple arrays (the same
3680 class definition should be present server side and client
3683 <para><emphasis>Note that this might pose a security risk</emphasis>,
3684 since in order to rebuild the object instances their constructor
3685 method has to be invoked, and this means that the remote client can
3686 trigger execution of unforeseen php code on the server: not really a
3687 code injection, but almost. Please enable this option only when you
3688 trust the remote clients.</para>
3690 <para>Example usage:</para>
3692 <para><programlisting language="php">/**
3693 * State name from state number decoder. NB: do NOT remove this comment block.
3694 * @param integer $stateno the state number
3695 * @return string the name of the state (or error description)
3697 function findstate($stateno)
3700 if (isset($stateNames[$stateno-1]))
3702 return $stateNames[$stateno-1];
3706 return "I don't have a state for the index '" . $stateno . "'";
3710 // wrap php function, build xmlrpc server
3712 $findstate_sig = wrap_php_function('findstate');
3714 $methods['examples.getStateName'] = $findstate_sig;
3715 $srv = new xmlrpc_server($methods);
3716 </programlisting></para>
3720 <sect1 id="deprecated">
3721 <title>Functions removed from the library</title>
3723 <para>The following two functions have been deprecated in version 1.1 of
3724 the library, and removed in version 2, in order to avoid conflicts with
3725 the EPI xml-rpc library, which also defines two functions with the same
3728 <para>To ease the transition to the new naming scheme and avoid breaking
3729 existing implementations, the following scheme has been adopted:
3732 <para>If EPI-XMLRPC is not active in the current PHP installation,
3733 the constant <literal>XMLRPC_EPI_ENABLED</literal> will be set to
3734 <literal>'0'</literal></para>
3738 <para>If EPI-XMLRPC is active in the current PHP installation, the
3739 constant <literal>XMLRPC_EPI_ENABLED</literal> will be set to
3740 <literal>'1'</literal></para>
3742 </itemizedlist></para>
3744 <para>The following documentation is kept for historical
3747 <sect2 id="xmlrpcdecode">
3748 <title>xmlrpc_decode</title>
3752 <funcdef><type>mixed</type><function>xmlrpc_decode</function></funcdef>
3754 <paramdef><type>xmlrpcval</type><parameter>$xmlrpc_val</parameter></paramdef>
3758 <para>Alias for php_xmlrpc_decode.</para>
3761 <sect2 id="xmlrpcencode">
3762 <title>xmlrpc_encode</title>
3766 <funcdef><type>xmlrpcval</type><function>xmlrpc_encode</function></funcdef>
3768 <paramdef><type>mixed</type><parameter>$phpval</parameter></paramdef>
3772 <para>Alias for php_xmlrpc_encode.</para>
3776 <sect1 id="debugging">
3777 <title>Debugging aids</title>
3780 <title>xmlrpc_debugmsg</title>
3784 <funcdef><type>void</type><function>xmlrpc_debugmsg</function></funcdef>
3786 <paramdef><type>string</type><parameter>$debugstring</parameter></paramdef>
3790 <para>Sends the contents of <parameter>$debugstring</parameter> in XML
3791 comments in the server return payload. If a PHP client has debugging
3792 turned on, the user will be able to see server debug
3795 <para>Use this function in your methods so you can pass back
3796 diagnostic information. It is only available from
3797 <filename>xmlrpcs.inc</filename>.</para>
3802 <chapter id="reserved" xreflabel="Reserved methods">
3803 <title>Reserved methods</title>
3805 <para>In order to extend the functionality offered by XML-RPC servers
3806 without impacting on the protocol, reserved methods are supported in this
3809 <para>All methods starting with <function>system.</function> are
3810 considered reserved by the server. PHP for XML-RPC itself provides four
3811 special methods, detailed in this chapter.</para>
3813 <para>Note that all server objects will automatically respond to clients
3814 querying these methods, unless the property
3815 <property>allow_system_funcs</property> has been set to
3816 <constant>false</constant> before calling the
3817 <methodname>service()</methodname> method. This might pose a security risk
3818 if the server is exposed to public access, e.g. on the internet.</para>
3821 <title>system.getCapabilities</title>
3827 <title>system.listMethods</title>
3829 <para>This method may be used to enumerate the methods implemented by
3830 the XML-RPC server.</para>
3832 <para>The <function>system.listMethods</function> method requires no
3833 parameters. It returns an array of strings, each of which is the name of
3834 a method implemented by the server.</para>
3837 <sect1 id="sysmethodsig">
3838 <title>system.methodSignature</title>
3840 <para>This method takes one parameter, the name of a method implemented
3841 by the XML-RPC server.</para>
3843 <para>It returns an array of possible signatures for this method. A
3844 signature is an array of types. The first of these types is the return
3845 type of the method, the rest are parameters.</para>
3847 <para>Multiple signatures (i.e. overloading) are permitted: this is the
3848 reason that an array of signatures are returned by this method.</para>
3850 <para>Signatures themselves are restricted to the top level parameters
3851 expected by a method. For instance if a method expects one array of
3852 structs as a parameter, and it returns a string, its signature is simply
3853 "string, array". If it expects three integers, its signature is "string,
3854 int, int, int".</para>
3856 <para>For parameters that can be of more than one type, the "undefined"
3857 string is supported.</para>
3859 <para>If no signature is defined for the method, a not-array value is
3860 returned. Therefore this is the way to test for a non-signature, if
3861 <parameter>$resp</parameter> below is the response object from a method
3862 call to <function>system.methodSignature</function>:</para>
3864 <programlisting language="php">
3865 $v = $resp->value();
3866 if ($v->kindOf() != "array") {
3867 // then the method did not have a signature defined
3871 <para>See the <filename>introspect.php</filename> demo included in this
3872 distribution for an example of using this method.</para>
3875 <sect1 id="sysmethhelp">
3876 <title>system.methodHelp</title>
3878 <para>This method takes one parameter, the name of a method implemented
3879 by the XML-RPC server.</para>
3881 <para>It returns a documentation string describing the use of that
3882 method. If no such string is available, an empty string is
3885 <para>The documentation string may contain HTML markup.</para>
3889 <title>system.multicall</title>
3891 <para>This method takes one parameter, an array of 'request' struct
3892 types. Each request struct must contain a
3893 <parameter>methodName</parameter> member of type string and a
3894 <parameter>params</parameter> member of type array, and corresponds to
3895 the invocation of the corresponding method.</para>
3897 <para>It returns a response of type array, with each value of the array
3898 being either an error struct (containing the faultCode and faultString
3899 members) or the successful response value of the corresponding single
3904 <chapter id="examples" xreflabel="Examples">
3905 <title>Examples</title>
3907 <para>The best examples are to be found in the sample files included with
3908 the distribution. Some are included here.</para>
3910 <sect1 id="statename">
3911 <title>XML-RPC client: state name query</title>
3913 <para>Code to get the corresponding state name from a number (1-50) from
3914 the demo server available on SourceForge</para>
3916 <programlisting language="php">
3917 $m = new xmlrpcmsg('examples.getStateName',
3918 array(new xmlrpcval($HTTP_POST_VARS["stateno"], "int")));
3919 $c = new xmlrpc_client("/server.php", "phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net", 80);
3920 $r = $c->send($m);
3921 if (!$r->faultCode()) {
3922 $v = $r->value();
3923 print "State number " . htmlentities($HTTP_POST_VARS["stateno"]) . " is " .
3924 htmlentities($v->scalarval()) . "<BR>";
3925 print "<HR>I got this value back<BR><PRE>" .
3926 htmlentities($r->serialize()) . "</PRE><HR>\n";
3928 print "Fault <BR>";
3929 print "Code: " . htmlentities($r->faultCode()) . "<BR>" .
3930 "Reason: '" . htmlentities($r->faultString()) . "'<BR>";
3936 <title>Executing a multicall call</title>
3938 <para>To be documented...</para>
3943 <title>Frequently Asked Questions</title>
3946 <title>How to send custom XML as payload of a method call</title>
3948 <para>Unfortunately, at the time the XML-RPC spec was designed, support
3949 for namespaces in XML was not as ubiquitous as it is now. As a
3950 consequence, no support was provided in the protocol for embedding XML
3951 elements from other namespaces into an xmlrpc request.</para>
3953 <para>To send an XML "chunk" as payload of a method call or response,
3954 two options are available: either send the complete XML block as a
3955 string xmlrpc value, or as a base64 value. Since the '<' character in
3956 string values is encoded as '&lt;' in the xml payload of the method
3957 call, the XML string will not break the surrounding xmlrpc, unless
3958 characters outside of the assumed character set are used. The second
3959 method has the added benefits of working independently of the charset
3960 encoding used for the xml to be transmitted, and preserving exactly
3961 whitespace, whilst incurring in some extra message length and cpu load
3962 (for carrying out the base64 encoding/decoding).</para>
3966 <title>Is there any limitation on the size of the requests / responses
3967 that can be successfully sent?</title>
3969 <para>Yes. But I have no hard figure to give; it most likely will depend
3970 on the version of PHP in usage and its configuration.</para>
3972 <para>Keep in mind that this library is not optimized for speed nor for
3973 memory usage. Better alternatives exist when there are strict
3974 requirements on throughput or resource usage, such as the php native
3975 xmlrpc extension (see the PHP manual for more information).</para>
3977 <para>Keep in mind also that HTTP is probably not the best choice in
3978 such a situation, and XML is a deadly enemy. CSV formatted data over
3979 socket would be much more efficient.</para>
3981 <para>If you really need to move a massive amount of data around, and
3982 you are crazy enough to do it using phpxmlrpc, your best bet is to
3983 bypass usage of the xmlrpcval objects, at least in the decoding phase,
3984 and have the server (or client) object return to the calling function
3985 directly php values (see <varname>xmlrpc_client::return_type</varname>
3986 and <varname>xmlrpc_server::functions_parameters_type</varname> for more
3991 <title>My server (client) returns an error whenever the client (server)
3992 returns accented characters</title>
3994 <para>To be documented...</para>
3998 <title>How to enable long-lasting method calls</title>
4000 <para>To be documented...</para>
4004 <title>My client returns "XML-RPC Fault #2: Invalid return payload:
4005 enable debugging to examine incoming payload": what should I do?</title>
4007 <para>The response you are seeing is a default error response that the
4008 client object returns to the php application when the server did not
4009 respond to the call with a valid xmlrpc response.</para>
4011 <para>The most likely cause is that you are not using the correct URL
4012 when creating the client object, or you do not have appropriate access
4013 rights to the web page you are requesting, or some other common http
4014 misconfiguration.</para>
4016 <para>To find out what the server is really returning to your client,
4017 you have to enable the debug mode of the client, using
4018 $client->setdebug(1);</para>
4022 <title>How can I save to a file the xml of the xmlrpc responses received
4023 from servers?</title>
4025 <para>If what you need is to save the responses received from the server
4026 as xml, you have two options:</para>
4028 <para>1- use the serialize() method on the response object.</para>
4030 <programlisting language="php">
4031 $resp = $client->send($msg);
4032 if (!$resp->faultCode())
4033 $data_to_be_saved = $resp->serialize();
4036 <para>Note that this will not be 100% accurate, since the xml generated
4037 by the response object can be different from the xml received,
4038 especially if there is some character set conversion involved, or such
4039 (eg. if you receive an empty string tag as <string/>, serialize()
4040 will output <string></string>), or if the server sent back
4041 as response something invalid (in which case the xml generated client
4042 side using serialize() will correspond to the error response generated
4043 internally by the lib).</para>
4045 <para>2 - set the client object to return the raw xml received instead
4046 of the decoded objects:</para>
4048 <programlisting language="php">
4049 $client = new xmlrpc_client($url);
4050 $client->return_type = 'xml';
4051 $resp = $client->send($msg);
4052 if (!$resp->faultCode())
4053 $data_to_be_saved = $resp->value();
4056 <para>Note that using this method the xml response response will not be
4057 parsed at all by the library, only the http communication protocol will
4058 be checked. This means that xmlrpc responses sent by the server that
4059 would have generated an error response on the client (eg. malformed xml,
4060 responses that have faultcode set, etc...) now will not be flagged as
4061 invalid, and you might end up saving not valid xml but random
4066 <title>Can I use the ms windows character set?</title>
4068 <para>If the data your application is using comes from a Microsoft
4069 application, there are some chances that the character set used to
4070 encode it is CP1252 (the same might apply to data received from an
4071 external xmlrpc server/client, but it is quite rare to find xmlrpc
4072 toolkits that encode to CP1252 instead of UTF8). It is a character set
4073 which is "almost" compatible with ISO 8859-1, but for a few extra
4076 <para>PHP-XMLRPC only supports the ISO 8859-1 and UTF8 character sets.
4077 The net result of this situation is that those extra characters will not
4078 be properly encoded, and will be received at the other end of the
4079 XML-RPC tranmission as "garbled data". Unfortunately the library cannot
4080 provide real support for CP1252 because of limitations in the PHP 4 xml
4081 parser. Luckily, we tried our best to support this character set anyway,
4082 and, since version 2.2.1, there is some form of support, left commented
4085 <para>To properly encode outgoing data that is natively in CP1252, you
4086 will have to uncomment all relative code in the file
4087 <filename>xmlrpc.inc</filename> (you can search for the string "1252"),
4088 then set <code>$GLOBALS['xmlrpc_internalencoding']='CP1252';</code>
4089 Please note that all incoming data will then be fed to your application
4090 as UTF-8 to avoid any potentail data loss.</para>
4094 <title>Does the library support using cookies / http sessions?</title>
4096 <para>In short: yes, but a little coding is needed to make it
4099 <para>The code below uses sessions to e.g. let the client store a value
4100 on the server and retrieve it later.</para>
4102 <para><programlisting>
4103 $resp = $client->send(new xmlrpcmsg('registervalue', array(new xmlrpcval('foo'), new xmlrpcval('bar'))));
4104 if (!$resp->faultCode())
4106 $cookies = $resp->cookies();
4107 if (array_key_exists('PHPSESSID', $cookies)) // nb: make sure to use the correct session cookie name
4109 $session_id = $cookies['PHPSESSID']['value'];
4111 // do some other stuff here...
4113 $client->setcookie('PHPSESSID', $session_id);
4114 $val = $client->send(new xmlrpcmsg('getvalue', array(new xmlrpcval('foo')));
4117 </programlisting>Server-side sessions are handled normally like in any other
4118 php application. Please see the php manual for more information about
4121 <para>NB: unlike web browsers, not all xmlrpc clients support usage of
4122 http cookies. If you have troubles with sessions and control only the
4123 server side of the communication, please check with the makers of the
4124 xmlrpc client in use.</para>
4128 <appendix id="integration">
4129 <title>Integration with the PHP xmlrpc extension</title>
4131 <para>To be documented more...</para>
4133 <para>In short: for the fastest execution possible, you can enable the php
4134 native xmlrpc extension, and use it in conjunction with phpxmlrpc. The
4135 following code snippet gives an example of such integration</para>
4137 <programlisting language="php">
4138 /*** client side ***/
4139 $c = new xmlrpc_client('http://phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net/server.php');
4141 // tell the client to return raw xml as response value
4142 $c->return_type = 'xml';
4144 // let the native xmlrpc extension take care of encoding request parameters
4145 $r = $c->send(xmlrpc_encode_request('examples.getStateName', $_POST['stateno']));
4147 if ($r->faultCode())
4148 // HTTP transport error
4149 echo 'Got error '.$r->faultCode();
4152 // HTTP request OK, but XML returned from server not parsed yet
4153 $v = xmlrpc_decode($r->value());
4154 // check if we got a valid xmlrpc response from server
4156 echo 'Got invalid response';
4158 // check if server sent a fault response
4159 if (xmlrpc_is_fault($v))
4160 echo 'Got xmlrpc fault '.$v['faultCode'];
4162 echo'Got response: '.htmlentities($v);
4167 <appendix id="substitution">
4168 <title>Substitution of the PHP xmlrpc extension</title>
4170 <para>Yet another interesting situation is when you are using a ready-made
4171 php application, that provides support for the XMLRPC protocol via the
4172 native php xmlrpc extension, but the extension is not available on your
4173 php install (e.g. because of shared hosting constraints).</para>
4175 <para>Since version 2.1, the PHP-XMLRPC library provides a compatibility
4176 layer that aims to be 100% compliant with the xmlrpc extension API. This
4177 means that any code written to run on the extension should obtain the
4178 exact same results, albeit using more resources and a longer processing
4179 time, using the PHP-XMLRPC library and the extension compatibility module.
4180 The module is part of the EXTRAS package, available as a separate download
4181 from the sourceforge.net website, since version 0.2</para>
4184 <appendix id="enough">
4185 <title>'Enough of xmlrpcvals!': new style library usage</title>
4187 <para>To be documented...</para>
4189 <para>In the meantime, see docs about xmlrpc_client::return_type and
4190 xmlrpc_server::functions_parameters_types, as well as php_xmlrpc_encode,
4191 php_xmlrpc_decode and php_xmlrpc_decode_xml</para>
4194 <appendix id="debugger">
4195 <title>Usage of the debugger</title>
4197 <para>A webservice debugger is included in the library to help during
4198 development and testing.</para>
4200 <para>The interface should be self-explicative enough to need little
4201 documentation.</para>
4203 <para><graphic align="center" fileref="debugger.gif"
4204 format="GIF" /></para>
4206 <para>The most useful feature of the debugger is without doubt the "Show
4207 debug info" option. It allows to have a screen dump of the complete http
4208 communication between client and server, including the http headers as
4209 well as the request and response payloads, and is invaluable when
4210 troubleshooting problems with charset encoding, authentication or http
4213 <para>The debugger can take advantage of the JSONRPC library extension, to
4214 allow debugging of JSON-RPC webservices, and of the JS-XMLRPC library
4215 visual editor to allow easy mouse-driven construction of the payload for
4216 remote methods. Both components have to be downloaded separately from the
4217 sourceforge.net web pages and copied to the debugger directory to enable
4218 the extra functionality:</para>
4220 <para><itemizedlist>
4222 <para>to enable jsonrpc functionality, download the PHP-XMLRPC
4223 EXTRAS package, and copy the file <filename>jsonrpc.inc</filename>
4224 either to the same directory as the debugger or somewhere in your
4225 php include path</para>
4227 </itemizedlist><itemizedlist>
4229 <para>to enable the visual value editing dialog, download the
4230 JS-XMLRPC library, and copy somewhere in the web root files
4231 <filename>visualeditor.php</filename>,
4232 <filename>visualeditor.css</filename> and the folders
4233 <filename>yui</filename> and <filename>img</filename>. Then edit the
4234 debugger file <filename>controller.php</filename> and set
4235 appropriately the variable <varname>$editorpath</varname>.</para>
4237 </itemizedlist></para>
4240 <!-- Keep this comment at the end of the file
4245 sgml-minimize-attributes:nil
4246 sgml-always-quote-attributes:t
4249 sgml-parent-document:nil
4250 sgml-exposed-tags:nil
4251 sgml-local-catalogs:nil
4252 sgml-local-ecat-files:nil
4253 sgml-namecase-general:t
4254 sgml-general-insert-case:lower