Question

I’ve got some Python code below that invokes an XML RPC method:

from xmlrpclib import ServerProxy

s = ServerProxy("http://localhost:8000")
s.SomeMethod('parameter')

However, what happens when the name of the method (SomeMethod) is only known at runtime? Is there any way to invoke a method when the name of the method is in a variable?

I’ve tried the following and none of them work:

s['SomeMethod']('parameter')
s.__getattr__('SomeMethod')('parameter')
getattr(s, 'SomeMethod')('parameter')

All of them return:

xmlrpclib.Fault: <Fault -32601: 'Method not found'>

---

Further edit: this is starting to get really strange. When I use s['SomeMethod']('parameter'), the remote server reports that I tried to invoke the XML method __getattr__.

Answer 1

getattr works as expected for me.
It fails if I try to get a repr of the returned value, as the ServerProxy class does not expose a “repr” method. Thus, if from the interactive prompt, I type just:

>>> getattr(proxy, "is_even")
Traceback (most recent call last):
(...)

xmlrpclib.Fault: <Fault 1: '<type \'exceptions.Exception\'>:method "is_even.__repr__" is not supported'>

But I can do this:

>>> a = getattr(proxy, "is_even")
>>> a(5)
False
>>> 

(The server-side snipped used is the one from Python’s cmlrpc documentation:
http://docs.python.org/library/xmlrpclib.html )