xmlrpc apis should be less strict?

[Walter Cruz]

In our journey though xmlrpc api clients, I'm testing now blogtk 2.0.

It almost works, but sometimes I gor a error like:

<type 'exceptions.Exception'> <Fault 3: 'Incorrect parameters passed to method: Wanted boolean, got int at param 5'>

and this shows on xmlrpc.log:

2009-08-29 00:33:08 metaWeblog.editPost
Invalid signature.

The problem is the field published, in metaWeblog.editPost and metaWeblog.newPost.

a snippet from createPost in blogtk2 createPost:

  publish = xmlrpclib.Boolean(publish)

  # Sanitize time for xmlrpc transport if needed.
  if content['dateCreated']:
   if isinstance(content['dateCreated'], xmlrpclib.DateTime) == False:
    content['dateCreated'] = xmlrpclib.DateTime(content['dateCreated'])

  try:
   result = rpcServer.metaWeblog.newPost(blogid, self.username, self.password, content, publish)
  except:
   # Some systems want an int instead of a boolean value. We'll assuage their
   # craziness for now.
   if publish == True:
    publish = 1
   else:
    publish = 0
   try:
    result = rpcServer.metaWeblog.newPost(blogid, self.username, self.password, content, publish)
   except Exception, e:
    raise Exception, str(e)

In this case, tries create post first with publish as a boolean type, and after as a int type. But the editPost method passes publish = 1, that is casted to int, making our editPost in metaweblog fail.

What we can do is to change the signatures from some methods from something more stritct (like $xmlrpcBoolean) to a ganeric value, (like $xmlrpcValue) and make the checks ourselfs (or send patches to the blogging clients, I'm sending at least bug reports, but I know Python and can easily fix the editPost methods in blogtk2).

What should we do?