Web services for Django...

[Jason Huggins]

Has anyone else thought about how SOAP or XML-RPC would work with
Django's Manipulators?

Okay... here's the "back story" to the question...

I have a "pre-alpha" web services layer (currently it's just for
XML-RPC, but I'd like to add SOAP, and even -- gasp-- the Atom
protocol). It's composed of three elements:
1) An "auth" middle ware that expects and parses HTTP Basic
Authentication headers (which is different than the default form based
authentication in Django.
2) An "xmlrpc" middleware that converts XML-RPC requests to/from Python
data structures... It's really just a wrapper that plugs xmlrpclib into
the Django 'middleware' workflow.
3) A "web service" view that can do basic CRUD operations on a django
model... It's kinda like Django's generic views, but it's more focused
on straight data structures... To me, it appears the existing "generic
views" in Django assume a web browser. They aren't "generic" enough.
:-)

Right now, I have get_list() and get_object() working fairly smoothly
through XML-RPC... even with permissions and authentication!

But things get tricker when it comes to add/update... Right now, I'm a
little stuck on the data model validation part... The existing Add and
Change Manipulators assume they are given an HTML form to parse. After
my xmlrpc middleware executes and hands off the request to the module
that'll do the "CRUD" operations, I'm already dealing with a straight
Python datastructure. I'm especially stuck on trying to figure how to
gracefully do validations and then return a data structure full of
error messages back through xml-rpc... The problem is that Django does
validations and error messages expecting a "flattened" name/value pair
data structure... That's because that's what HTML forms provide... but
with XML-RPC and SOAP, you're not limited to flat name/value pair data
structures... I'm just starting to figure out how to hack my XML-RPC
stuff into Django Manipulators without too much pain....

- Jason

[funny_...@mail.ru]

Agree. It would be usefull if we could use the same validation code for
a html form and for a AJAX (with xmlrpc and json). It could be done by
splitting parse of raw_post_data to Python structure and validation of
it.

[Amit Upadhyay]

Hi Jason,

I have been thinking of the same thing, and I have an implementation at
http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/547. Its a near literal copy of
SimpleXMLRPCServer, long live open source :-)

--
Amit Upadhyay
Blog: http://www.rootshell.be/~upadhyay
+91-9867-359-701