XML-RPC for PHP version 3.1.0 July 1, 2017 Edd Dumbill Gaetano Giunta Miles Lott Justin R. Miller Andres Salomon 1999,2000,2001 Edd Dumbill, Useful Information Company All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. Neither the name of the "XML-RPC for PHP" nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. Introduction XML-RPC is a format devised by Userland Software for achieving remote procedure call via XML using HTTP as the transport. XML-RPC has its own web site, www.xmlrpc.com This collection of PHP classes provides a framework for writing XML-RPC clients and servers in PHP. Main goals of the project are ease of use, flexibility and completeness. The original author is Edd Dumbill of Useful Information Company. As of the 1.0 stable release, the project was opened to wider involvement and moved to SourceForge; later, to Github A list of XML-RPC implementations for other languages such as Perl and Python can be found on the www.xmlrpc.com site. Acknowledgements Daniel E. Baumann James Bercegay Leon Blackwell Stephane Bortzmeyer Daniel Convissor Geoffrey T. Dairiki Stefan Esser James Flemer Ernst de Haan Tom Knight Axel Kollmorgen Peter Kocks Daniel Krippner S. Kuip A. Lambert Frederic Lecointre Dan Libby Arnaud Limbourg Ernest MacDougal Campbell III Lukasz Mach Kjartan Mannes Ben Margolin Nicolay Mausz Justin Miller Jan Pfeifer Giancarlo Pinerolo Peter Russel Jean-Jacques Sarton Viliam Simko Idan Sofer Douglas Squirrel Heiko Stübner Anatoly Techtonik Tommaso Trani Eric van der Vlist Christian Wenz Jim Winstead Przemyslaw Wroblewski Bruno Zanetti Melotti What's new Note: not all items the following list have (yet) been fully documented, and some might not be present in any other chapter in the manual. To find a more detailed description of new functions and methods please take a look at the source code of the library, which is quite thoroughly commented in javadoc-like form. 3.1.0 This release makes the library compatible with php 7 by removing the deprecation warnings addition of a 'setSSLVersion' method to the client class 3.0.1 fixed: the library does not decode correctly LATIN-1 requests/responses if the character set is not set in the xml prolog fixed: the debugger sends incorrect requests when the payload includes LATIN-1 characters fixed: the client can not call remote methods which use LATIN-1 or UTF8 characters in their names 3.0.0 Note: this is the last release of the library that will support PHP 5.1 and up. Future releases will target php 5.3 as minimum supported version. when using curl and keepalive, reset curl handle if we did not get back an http 200 response (eg a 302) omit port on http 'Host' header if it is 80 test suite allows interrogating https servers ignoring their certs method setAcceptedCompression was failing to disable reception of compressed responses if the client supported them 3.0.0 beta This is the first release of the library to only support PHP 5. Some legacy code has been removed, and support for features such as exceptions and dateTime objects introduced. The "beta" tag is meant to indicate the fact that the refactoring has been more widespread than in precedent releases and that more changes are likely to be introduced with time - the library is still considered to be production quality. improved: removed all usage of php functions deprecated in php 5.3, usage of assign-by-ref when creating new objects etc... improved: add support for the <ex:nil/> tag used by the apache library, both in input and output improved: add support for dateTime objects in both in php_xmlrpc_encode and as parameter for constructor of xmlrpcval improved: add support for timestamps as parameter for constructor of xmlrpcval improved: add option 'dates_as_objects' to php_xmlrpc_decode to return dateTime objects for xmlrpc datetimes improved: add new method SetCurlOptions to xmrlpc_client to allow extra flexibility in tweaking http config, such as explicitly binding to an ip address improved: add new method SetUserAgent to xmrlpc_client to to allow having different user-agent http headers improved: add a new member variable in server class to allow fine-tuning of the encoding of returned values when the server is in 'phpvals' mode improved: allow servers in 'xmlrpcvals' mode to also register plain php functions by defining them in the dispatch map with an added option improved: catch exceptions thrown during execution of php functions exposed as methods by the server fixed: bad encoding if same object is encoded twice using php_xmlrpc_encode 2.2.2 Note: this might the last release of the library that will support PHP 4. Future releases (if any) should target php 5.0 as minimum supported version. fixed: encoding of utf-8 characters outside of the BMP plane fixed: character set declarations surrounded by double quotes were not recognized in http headers fixed: be more tolerant in detection of charset in http headers fixed: fix detection of zlib.output_compression fixed: use feof() to test if socket connections are to be closed instead of the number of bytes read (rare bug when communicating with some servers) fixed: format floating point values using the correct decimal separator even when php locale is set to one that uses comma fixed: improve robustness of the debugger when parsing weird results from non-compliant servers php warning when receiving 'false' in a bool value improved: allow the add_to_map server method to add docs for single params too improved: added the possibility to wrap for exposure as xmlrpc methods plain php class methods, object methods and even whole classes 2.2.1 fixed: work aroung bug in php 5.2.2 which broke support of HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA fixed: is_dir parameter of setCaCertificate() method is reversed fixed: a php warning in xmlrpc_client creator method fixed: parsing of '1e+1' as valid float fixed: allow errorlevel 3 to work when prev. error handler was a static method fixed: usage of client::setcookie() for multiple cookies in non-ssl mode improved: support for CP1252 charset is not part or the library but almost possible improved: more info when curl is enabled and debug mode is on 2.2 fixed: debugger errors on php installs with magic_quotes_gpc on fixed: support for https connections via proxy fixed: wrap_xmlrpc_method() generated code failed to properly encode php objects improved: slightly faster encoding of data which is internally UTF-8 improved: debugger always generates a 'null' id for jsonrpc if user omits it new: debugger can take advantage of a graphical value builder (it has to be downloaded separately, as part of jsxmlrpc package. See Appendix D for more details) new: support for the <NIL/> xmlrpc extension. see below for more details new: server support for the system.getCapabilities xmlrpc extension new: wrap_xmlrpc_method() accepts two new options: debug and return_on_fault 2.1 The wrap_php_function and wrap_xmlrpc_method functions have been moved out of the base library file xmlrpc.inc into a file of their own: xmlrpc_wrappers.inc. You will have to include() / require() it in your scripts if you have been using those functions. For increased security, the automatic rebuilding of php object instances out of received xmlrpc structs in wrap_xmlrpc_method() has been disabled (but it can be optionally re-enabled). Both wrap_php_function() and wrap_xmlrpc_method() functions accept many more options to fine tune their behaviour, including one to return the php code to be saved and later used as standalone php script The constructor of xmlrpcval() values has seen some internal changes, and it will not throw a php warning anymore when invoked using an unknown xmlrpc type: the error will only be written to php error log. Also new xmlrpcval('true', 'boolean') is not supported anymore The new function php_xmlrpc_decode_xml() will take the xml representation of either an xmlrpc request, response or single value and return the corresponding php-xmlrpc object instance A new function wrap_xmlrpc_server()has been added, to wrap all (or some) of the methods exposed by a remote xmlrpc server into a php class A new file has been added: verify_compat.php, to help users diagnose the level of compliance of their php installation with the library Restored compatibility with php 4.0.5 (for those poor souls still stuck on it) Method xmlrpc_server->service() now returns a value: either the response payload or xmlrpcresp object instance Method xmlrpc_server->add_to_map() now accepts xmlrpc methods with no param definitions Documentation for single parameters of exposed methods can be added to the dispatch map (and turned into html docs in conjunction with a future release of the 'extras' package) Full response payload is saved into xmlrpcresp object for further debugging The debugger can now generate code that wraps a remote method into a php function (works for jsonrpc, too); it also has better support for being activated via a single GET call (e.g. for integration into other tools) Stricter parsing of incoming xmlrpc messages: two more invalid cases are now detected (double data element inside array and struct/array after scalar inside value element) More logging of errors in a lot of situations Javadoc documentation of lib files (almost) complete Many performance tweaks and code cleanups, plus the usual crop of bugs fixed (see NEWS file for complete list of bugs) Lib internals have been modified to provide better support for grafting extra functionality on top of it. Stay tuned for future releases of the EXTRAS package (or go read Appendix B)... 2.0 final Added to the client class the possibility to use Digest and NTLM authentication methods (when using the CURL library) for connecting to servers and NTLM for connecting to proxies Added to the client class the possibility to specify alternate certificate files/directories for authenticating the peer with when using HTTPS communication Reviewed all examples and added a new demo file, containing a proxy to forward xmlrpc requests to other servers (useful e.g. for ajax coding) The debugger has been upgraded to reflect the new client capabilities All known bugs have been squashed, and the lib is more tolerant than ever of commonly-found mistakes 2.0 Release candidate 3 Added to server class the property functions_parameters_type, that allows the server to register plain php functions as xmlrpc methods (i.e. functions that do not take an xmlrpcmsg object as unique param) let server and client objects serialize calls using a specified character set encoding for the produced xml instead of US-ASCII (ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 supported) let php_xmlrpc_decode accept xmlrpcmsg objects as valid input 'class::method' syntax is now accepted in the server dispatch map xmlrpc_clent::SetDebug() accepts integer values instead of a boolean value, with debugging level 2 adding to the information printed to screen the complete client request 2.0 Release candidate 2 Added a new property of the client object: xmlrpc_client->return_type, indicating whether calls to the send() method will return xmlrpcresp objects whose value() is an xmlrpcval object, a php value (automatically decoded) or the raw xml received from the server. Added in the extras dir. two new library file: jsonrpc.inc and jsonrpcs.inc containing new classes that implement support for the json-rpc protocol (alpha quality code) Added a new client method: setKey($key, $keypass) to be used in HTTPS connections Added a new file containing some benchmarks in the testsuite directory 2.0 Release candidate 1 Support for HTTP proxies (new method: xmlrpc_client::setProxy()) Support HTTP compression of both requests and responses. Clients can specify what kind of compression they accept for responses between deflate/gzip/any, and whether to compress the requests. Servers by default compress responses to clients that explicitly declare support for compression (new methods: xmlrpc_client::setAcceptedCompression(), xmlrpc_client::setRequestCompression()). Note that the ZLIB php extension needs to be enabled in PHP to support compression. Implement HTTP 1.1 connections, but only if CURL is enabled (added an extra parameter to xmlrpc_client::xmlrpc_client to set the desired HTTP protocol at creation time and a new supported value for the last parameter of xmlrpc_client::send, which now can be safely omitted if it has been specified at creation time) With PHP versions greater than 4.3.8 keep-alives are enabled by default for HTTP 1.1 connections. This should yield faster execution times when making multiple calls in sequence to the same xml-rpc server from a single client. Introduce support for cookies. Cookies to be sent to the server with a request can be set using xmlrpc_client::setCookie(), while cookies received from the server are found in xmlrpcresp::cookies(). It is left to the user to check for validity of received cookies and decide whether they apply to successive calls or not. Better support for detecting different character set encodings of xml-rpc requests and responses: both client and server objects will correctly detect the charset encoding of received xml, and use an appropriate xml parser. Supported encodings are US-ASCII, UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1. Added one new xmlrpcmsg constructor syntax, allowing usage of a single string with the complete URL of the target server Convert xml-rpc boolean values into native php values instead of 0 and 1 Force the php_xmlrpc_encode function to properly encode numerically indexed php arrays into xml-rpc arrays (numerically indexed php arrays always start with a key of 0 and increment keys by values of 1) Prevent the php_xmlrpc_encode function from further re-encoding any objects of class xmlrpcval that are passed to it. This allows to call the function with arguments consisting of mixed php values / xmlrpcval objects. Allow a server to NOT respond to system.* method calls (setting the $server->allow_system_funcs property). Implement a new xmlrpcval method to determine if a value of type struct has a member of a given name without having to loop trough all members: xmlrpcval::structMemExists() Expand methods xmlrpcval::addArray, addScalar and addStruct allowing extra php values to be added to xmlrpcval objects already formed. Let the xmlrpc_client::send method accept an XML string for sending instead of an xmlrpcmsg object, to facilitate debugging and integration with the php native xmlrpc extension Extend the php_xmlrpc_encode and php_xmlrpc_decode functions to allow serialization and rebuilding of PHP objects. To successfully rebuild a serialized object, the object class must be defined in the deserializing end of the transfer. Note that object members of type resource will be deserialized as NULL values. Note that his has been implemented adding a "php_class" attribute to xml representation of xmlrpcval of STRUCT type, which, strictly speaking, breaks the xml-rpc spec. Other xmlrpc implementations are supposed to ignore such an attribute (unless they implement a brain-dead custom xml parser...), so it should be safe enabling it in heterogeneous environments. The activation of this feature is done by usage of an option passed as second parameter to both php_xmlrpc_encode and php_xmlrpc_decode. Extend the php_xmlrpc_encode function to allow automatic serialization of iso8601-conforming php strings as datetime.iso8601 xmlrpcvals, by usage of an optional parameter Added an automatic stub code generator for converting xmlrpc methods to php functions and vice-versa. This is done via two new functions: wrap_php_function and wrap_xmlrpc_method, and has many caveats, with php being a typeless language and all... With PHP versions lesser than 5.0.3 wrapping of php functions into xmlrpc methods is not supported yet. Allow object methods to be used in server dispatch map Added a complete debugger solution, in the debugger folder Added configurable server-side debug messages, controlled by the new method xmlrpc_server::SetDebug(). At level 0, no debug messages are sent to the client; level 1 is the same as the old behaviour; at level 2 a lot more info is echoed back to the client, regarding the received call; at level 3 all warnings raised during server processing are trapped (this prevents breaking the xml to be echoed back to the client) and added to the debug info sent back to the client New XML parsing code, yields smaller memory footprint and faster execution times, not to mention complete elimination of the dreaded eval() construct, so prone to code injection exploits Rewritten most of the error messages, making text more explicative System Requirements The library has been designed with goals of scalability and backward compatibility. As such, it supports a wide range of PHP installs. Note that not all features of the lib are available in every configuration. The minimum supported PHP version is 5.1. If you wish to use SSL or HTTP 1.1 to communicate with remote servers, you need the "curl" extension compiled into your PHP installation. The "xmlrpc" native extension is not required to be compiled into your PHP installation, but if it is, there will be no interference with the operation of this library. Files in the distribution lib/xmlrpc.inc the XML-RPC classes. include() this in your PHP files to use the classes. lib/xmlrpcs.inc the XML-RPC server class. include() this in addition to xmlrpc.inc to get server functionality lib/xmlrpc_wrappers.inc helper functions to "automagically" convert plain php functions to xmlrpc services and vice versa demo/server/proxy.php a sample server implementing xmlrpc proxy functionality. demo/server/server.php a sample server hosting various demo functions, as well as a full suite of functions used for interoperability testing. It is used by testsuite.php (see below) for unit testing the library, and is not to be copied literally into your production servers demo/client/client.php, demo/client/agesort.php, demo/client/which.php client code to exercise some of the functions in server.php, including the interopEchoTests.whichToolkit method. demo/client/wrap.php client code to illustrate 'wrapping' of remote methods into php functions. demo/client/introspect.php client code to illustrate usage of introspection capabilities offered by server.php. demo/client/mail.php client code to illustrate usage of an xmlrpc-to-email gateway using Dave Winer's XML-RPC server at userland.com. demo/client/zopetest.php example client code that queries an xmlrpc server built in Zope. demo/vardemo.php examples of how to construct xmlrpcval types demo/demo1.txt, demo/demo2.txt, demo/demo3.txt XML-RPC responses captured in a file for testing purposes (you can use these to test the xmlrpcmsg->parseResponse() method). demo/server/discuss.php, demo/client/comment.php Software used in the PHP chapter of to provide a comment server and allow the attachment of comments to stories from Meerkat's data store. test/testsuite.php, test/parse_args.php A unit test suite for this software package. If you do development on this software, please consider submitting tests for this suite. test/benchmark.php A (very limited) benchmarking suite for this software package. If you do development on this software, please consider submitting benchmarks for this suite. test/phpunit.php, test/PHPUnit/*.php An (incomplete) version PEAR's unit test framework for PHP. The complete package can be found at http://pear.php.net/package/PHPUnit test/verify_compat.php Script designed to help the user to verify the level of compatibility of the library with the current php install extras/test.pl, extras/test.py Perl and Python programs to exercise server.php to test that some of the methods work. extras/workspace.testPhpServer.fttb Frontier scripts to exercise the demo server. Thanks to Dave Winer for permission to include these. See Dave's announcement of these. extras/rsakey.pem A test certificate key for the SSL support, which can be used to generate dummy certificates. It has the passphrase "test." Known bugs and limitations This started out as a bare framework. Many "nice" bits haven't been put in yet. Specifically, very little type validation or coercion has been put in. PHP being a loosely-typed language, this is going to have to be done explicitly (in other words: you can call a lot of library functions passing them arguments of the wrong type and receive an error message only much further down the code, where it will be difficult to understand). dateTime.iso8601 is supported opaquely. It can't be done natively as the XML-RPC specification explicitly forbids passing of timezone specifiers in ISO8601 format dates. You can, however, use the and functions to do the encoding and decoding for you. Very little HTTP response checking is performed (e.g. HTTP redirects are not followed and the Content-Length HTTP header, mandated by the xml-rpc spec, is not validated); cookie support still involves quite a bit of coding on the part of the user. If a specific character set encoding other than US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 is received in the HTTP header or XML prologue of xml-rpc request or response messages then it will be ignored for the moment, and the content will be parsed as if it had been encoded using the charset defined by Support for receiving from servers version 1 cookies (i.e. conforming to RFC 2965) is quite incomplete, and might cause unforeseen errors. Support Online Support XML-RPC for PHP is offered "as-is" without any warranty or commitment to support. However, informal advice and help is available via the XML-RPC for PHP website and mailing list and from XML-RPC.com. The XML-RPC for PHP development is hosted on github.com/gggeek/phpxmlrpc. Bugs, feature requests and patches can be posted to the project's website. The PHP XML-RPC interest mailing list is run by the author. More details can be found here. For more general XML-RPC questions, there is a Yahoo! Groups XML-RPC mailing list. The XML-RPC.com discussion group is a useful place to get help with using XML-RPC. This group is also gatewayed into the Yahoo! Groups mailing list. The Jellyfish Book Together with Simon St.Laurent and Joe Johnston, Edd Dumbill wrote a book on XML-RPC for O'Reilly and Associates on XML-RPC. It features a rather fetching jellyfish on the cover. Complete details of the book are available from O'Reilly's web site. Edd is responsible for the chapter on PHP, which includes a worked example of creating a forum server, and hooking it up the O'Reilly's Meerkat service in order to allow commenting on news stories from around the Web. If you've benefited from the effort that has been put into writing this software, then please consider buying the book! Class documentation xmlrpcval This is where a lot of the hard work gets done. This class enables the creation and encapsulation of values for XML-RPC. Ensure you've read the XML-RPC spec at http://www.xmlrpc.com/stories/storyReader$7 before reading on as it will make things clearer. The xmlrpcval class can store arbitrarily complicated values using the following types: i4 int boolean string double dateTime.iso8601 base64 array struct null. You should refer to the spec for more information on what each of these types mean. Notes on types int The type i4 is accepted as a synonym for int when creating xmlrpcval objects. The xml parsing code will always convert i4 to int: int is regarded by this implementation as the canonical name for this type. base64 Base 64 encoding is performed transparently to the caller when using this type. Decoding is also transparent. Therefore you ought to consider it as a "binary" data type, for use when you want to pass data that is not 7-bit clean. boolean The php values true and 1 map to true. All other values (including the empty string) are converted to false. string Characters <, >, ', ", &, are encoded using their entity reference as &lt; &gt; &apos; &quot; and &amp; All other characters outside of the ASCII range are encoded using their character reference representation (e.g. &#200 for é). The XML-RPC spec recommends only encoding < & but this implementation goes further, for reasons explained by the XML 1.0 recommendation. In particular, using character reference representation has the advantage of producing XML that is valid independently of the charset encoding assumed. null There is no support for encoding null values in the XML-RPC spec, but at least a couple of extensions (and many toolkits) do support it. Before using null values in your messages, make sure that the responding party accepts them, and uses the same encoding convention (see ...). Creation The constructor is the normal way to create an xmlrpcval. The constructor can take these forms: xmlrpcvalnew xmlrpcval xmlrpcvalnew xmlrpcval string$stringVal xmlrpcvalnew xmlrpcval mixed$scalarVal string$scalartyp xmlrpcvalnew xmlrpcval array$arrayVal string$arraytyp The first constructor creates an empty value, which must be altered using the methods addScalar, addArray or addStruct before it can be used. The second constructor creates a simple string value. The third constructor is used to create a scalar value. The second parameter must be a name of an XML-RPC type. Valid types are: "int", "boolean", "string", "double", "dateTime.iso8601", "base64" or "null". Examples: $myInt = new xmlrpcvalue(1267, "int"); $myString = new xmlrpcvalue("Hello, World!", "string"); $myBool = new xmlrpcvalue(1, "boolean"); $myString2 = new xmlrpcvalue(1.24, "string"); // note: this will serialize a php float value as xmlrpc string The fourth constructor form can be used to compose complex XML-RPC values. The first argument is either a simple array in the case of an XML-RPC array or an associative array in the case of a struct. The elements of the array must be xmlrpcval objects themselves. The second parameter must be either "array" or "struct". Examples: $myArray = new xmlrpcval( array( new xmlrpcval("Tom"), new xmlrpcval("Dick"), new xmlrpcval("Harry") ), "array"); // recursive struct $myStruct = new xmlrpcval( array( "name" => new xmlrpcval("Tom", "string"), "age" => new xmlrpcval(34, "int"), "address" => new xmlrpcval( array( "street" => new xmlrpcval("Fifht Ave", "string"), "city" => new xmlrpcval("NY", "string") ), "struct") ), "struct"); See the file vardemo.php in this distribution for more examples. Methods addScalar intaddScalar string$stringVal intaddScalar mixed$scalarVal string$scalartyp If $val is an empty xmlrpcval this method makes it a scalar value, and sets that value. If $val is already a scalar value, then no more scalars can be added and 0 is returned. If $val is an xmlrpcval of type array, the php value $scalarval is added as its last element. If all went OK, 1 is returned, otherwise 0. addArray intaddArray array$arrayVal The argument is a simple (numerically indexed) array. The elements of the array must be xmlrpcval objects themselves. Turns an empty xmlrpcval into an array with contents as specified by $arrayVal. If $val is an xmlrpcval of type array, the elements of $arrayVal are appended to the existing ones. See the fourth constructor form for more information. If all went OK, 1 is returned, otherwise 0. addStruct intaddStruct array$assocArrayVal The argument is an associative array. The elements of the array must be xmlrpcval objects themselves. Turns an empty xmlrpcval into a struct with contents as specified by $assocArrayVal. If $val is an xmlrpcval of type struct, the elements of $arrayVal are merged with the existing ones. See the fourth constructor form for more information. If all went OK, 1 is returned, otherwise 0. kindOf stringkindOf Returns a string containing "struct", "array" or "scalar" describing the base type of the value. If it returns "undef" it means that the value hasn't been initialised. serialize stringserialize Returns a string containing the XML-RPC representation of this value. scalarVal mixedscalarVal If $val->kindOf() == "scalar", this method returns the actual PHP-language value of the scalar (base 64 decoding is automatically handled here). scalarTyp stringscalarTyp If $val->kindOf() == "scalar", this method returns a string denoting the type of the scalar. As mentioned before, i4 is always coerced to int. arrayMem xmlrpcvalarrayMem int$n If $val->kindOf() == "array", returns the $nth element in the array represented by the value $val. The value returned is an xmlrpcval object. // iterating over values of an array object for ($i = 0; $i < $val->arraySize(); $i++) { $v = $val->arrayMem($i); echo "Element $i of the array is of type ".$v->kindOf(); } arraySize intarraySize If $val is an array, returns the number of elements in that array. structMem xmlrpcvalstructMem string$memberName If $val->kindOf() == "struct", returns the element called $memberName from the struct represented by the value $val. The value returned is an xmlrpcval object. structEach arraystructEach Returns the next (key, value) pair from the struct, when $val is a struct. $value is an xmlrpcval itself. See also . // iterating over all values of a struct object $val->structreset(); while (list($key, $v) = $val->structEach()) { echo "Element $key of the struct is of type ".$v->kindOf(); } structReset voidstructReset Resets the internal pointer for structEach() to the beginning of the struct, where $val is a struct. structMemExists boolstructMemExsists string$memberName Returns TRUE or FALSE depending on whether a member of the given name exists in the struct. xmlrpcmsg This class provides a representation for a request to an XML-RPC server. A client sends an xmlrpcmsg to a server, and receives back an xmlrpcresp (see ). Creation The constructor takes the following forms: xmlrpcmsgnew xmlrpcmsg string$methodName array$parameterArraynull Where methodName is a string indicating the name of the method you wish to invoke, and parameterArray is a simple php Array of xmlrpcval objects. Here's an example message to the US state name server: $msg = new xmlrpcmsg("examples.getStateName", array(new xmlrpcval(23, "int"))); This example requests the name of state number 23. For more information on xmlrpcval objects, see . Note that the parameterArray parameter is optional and can be omitted for methods that take no input parameters or if you plan to add parameters one by one. Methods addParam booladdParam xmlrpcval$xmlrpcVal Adds the xmlrpcval xmlrpcVal to the parameter list for this method call. Returns TRUE or FALSE on error. getNumParams intgetNumParams Returns the number of parameters attached to this message. getParam xmlrpcvalgetParam int$n Gets the nth parameter in the message (with the index zero-based). Use this method in server implementations to retrieve the values sent by the client. method stringmethod stringmethod string$methName Gets or sets the method contained in the XML-RPC message. parseResponse xmlrpcrespparseResponse string$xmlString Given an incoming XML-RPC server response contained in the string $xmlString, this method constructs an xmlrpcresp response object and returns it, setting error codes as appropriate (see ). This method processes any HTTP/MIME headers it finds. parseResponseFile xmlrpcrespparseResponseFile file handle resource$fileHandle Given an incoming XML-RPC server response on the open file handle fileHandle, this method reads all the data it finds and passes it to parseResponse. This method is useful to construct responses from pre-prepared files (see files demo1.txt, demo2.txt, demo3.txt in this distribution). It processes any HTTP headers it finds, and does not close the file handle. serialize string serialize Returns the an XML string representing the XML-RPC message. xmlrpc_client This is the basic class used to represent a client of an XML-RPC server. Creation The constructor accepts one of two possible syntaxes: xmlrpc_clientnew xmlrpc_client string$server_url xmlrpc_clientnew xmlrpc_client string$server_path string$server_hostname int$server_port80 string$transport'http' Here are a couple of usage examples of the first form: $client = new xmlrpc_client("http://phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net/server.php"); $another_client = new xmlrpc_client("https://james:bond@secret.service.com:443/xmlrpcserver?agent=007"); The second syntax does not allow to express a username and password to be used for basic HTTP authorization as in the second example above, but instead it allows to choose whether xmlrpc calls will be made using the HTTP 1.0 or 1.1 protocol. Here's another example client set up to query Userland's XML-RPC server at betty.userland.com: $client = new xmlrpc_client("/RPC2", "betty.userland.com", 80); The server_port parameter is optional, and if omitted will default to 80 when using HTTP and 443 when using HTTPS (see the method below). The transport parameter is optional, and if omitted will default to 'http'. Allowed values are either 'http', 'https' or 'http11'. Its value can be overridden with every call to the send method. See the send method below for more details about the meaning of the different values. Methods This class supports the following methods. send This method takes the forms: xmlrpcrespsend xmlrpcmsg$xmlrpc_message int$timeout string$transport arraysend array$xmlrpc_messages int$timeout string$transport xmlrpcrespsend string$xml_payload int$timeout string$transport Where xmlrpc_message is an instance of xmlrpcmsg (see ), and response is an instance of xmlrpcresp (see ). If xmlrpc_messages is an array of message instances, responses will be an array of response instances. The client will try to make use of a single system.multicall xml-rpc method call to forward to the server all the messages in a single HTTP round trip, unless $client->no_multicall has been previously set to TRUE (see the multicall method below), in which case many consecutive xmlrpc requests will be sent. The third syntax allows to build by hand (or any other means) a complete xmlrpc request message, and send it to the server. xml_payload should be a string containing the complete xml representation of the request. It is e.g. useful when, for maximal speed of execution, the request is serialized into a string using the native php xmlrpc functions (see the php manual on xmlrpc). The timeout is optional, and will be set to 0 (wait for platform-specific predefined timeout) if omitted. This timeout value is passed to fsockopen(). It is also used for detecting server timeouts during communication (i.e. if the server does not send anything to the client for timeout seconds, the connection will be closed). The transport parameter is optional, and if omitted will default to the transport set using instance creator or 'http' if omitted. The only other valid values are 'https', which will use an SSL HTTP connection to connect to the remote server, and 'http11'. Note that your PHP must have the "curl" extension compiled in order to use both these features. Note that when using SSL you should normally set your port number to 443, unless the SSL server you are contacting runs at any other port. PHP 4.0.6 has a bug which prevents SSL working. In addition to low-level errors, the XML-RPC server you were querying may return an error in the xmlrpcresp object. See for details of how to handle these errors. multiCall This method takes the form: arraymultiCall array$messages int$timeout string$transport bool$fallback This method is used to boxcar many method calls in a single xml-rpc request. It will try first to make use of the system.multicall xml-rpc method call, and fall back to executing many separate requests if the server returns any error. msgs is an array of xmlrpcmsg objects (see ), and response is an array of xmlrpcresp objects (see ). The timeout and transport parameters are optional, and behave as in the send method above. The fallback parameter is optional, and defaults to TRUE. When set to FALSE it will prevent the client to try using many single method calls in case of failure of the first multicall request. It should be set only when the server is known to support the multicall extension. setAcceptedCompression voidsetAcceptedCompression string$compressionmethod This method defines whether the client will accept compressed xml payload forming the bodies of the xmlrpc responses received from servers. Note that enabling reception of compressed responses merely adds some standard http headers to xmlrpc requests. It is up to the xmlrpc server to return compressed responses when receiving such requests. Allowed values for compressionmethod are: 'gzip', 'deflate', 'any' or null (with any meaning either gzip or deflate). This requires the "zlib" extension to be enabled in your php install. If it is, by default xmlrpc_client instances will enable reception of compressed content. setCaCertificate voidsetCaCertificate string$certificate bool$is_dir This method sets an optional certificate to be used in SSL-enabled communication to validate a remote server with (when the server_method is set to 'https' in the client's construction or in the send method and SetSSLVerifypeer has been set to TRUE). The certificate parameter must be the filename of a PEM formatted certificate, or a directory containing multiple certificate files. The is_dir parameter defaults to FALSE, set it to TRUE to specify that certificate indicates a directory instead of a single file. This requires the "curl" extension to be compiled into your installation of PHP. For more details see the man page for the curl_setopt function. setCertificate voidsetCertificate string$certificate string$passphrase This method sets the optional certificate and passphrase used in SSL-enabled communication with a remote server (when the server_method is set to 'https' in the client's construction or in the send method). The certificate parameter must be the filename of a PEM formatted certificate. The passphrase parameter must contain the password required to use the certificate. This requires the "curl" extension to be compiled into your installation of PHP. For more details see the man page for the curl_setopt function. Note: to retrieve information about the client certificate on the server side, you will need to look into the environment variables which are set up by the webserver. Different webservers will typically set up different variables. setCookie voidsetCookie string$name string$value string$path string$domain int$port This method sets a cookie that will be sent to the xmlrpc server along with every further request (useful e.g. for keeping session info outside of the xml-rpc payload). $value is optional, and defaults to null. $path, $domain and $port are optional, and will be omitted from the cookie header if unspecified. Note that setting any of these values will turn the cookie into a 'version 1' cookie, that might not be fully supported by the server (see RFC2965 for more details). setCredentials voidsetCredentials string$username string$password int$authtype This method sets the username and password for authorizing the client to a server. With the default (HTTP) transport, this information is used for HTTP Basic authorization. Note that username and password can also be set using the class constructor. With HTTP 1.1 and HTTPS transport, NTLM and Digest authentication protocols are also supported. To enable them use the constants CURLAUTH_DIGEST and CURLAUTH_NTLM as values for the authtype parameter. setCurlOptions voidsetCurlOptions array$options This method allows to directly set any desired option to manipulate the usage of the cURL client (when in cURL mode). It can be used eg. to explicitly bind to an outgoing ip address when the server is multihomed setDebug voidsetDebug int$debugLvl debugLvl is either 0, 1 or 2 depending on whether you require the client to print debugging information to the browser. The default is not to output this information (0). The debugging information at level 1includes the raw data returned from the XML-RPC server it was querying (including bot HTTP headers and the full XML payload), and the PHP value the client attempts to create to represent the value returned by the server. At level2, the complete payload of the xmlrpc request is also printed, before being sent t the server. This option can be very useful when debugging servers as it allows you to see exactly what the client sends and the server returns. setKey voidsetKey int$key int$keypass This method sets the optional certificate key and passphrase used in SSL-enabled communication with a remote server (when the transport is set to 'https' in the client's construction or in the send method). This requires the "curl" extension to be compiled into your installation of PHP. For more details see the man page for the curl_setopt function. setProxy voidsetProxy string$proxyhost int$proxyport string$proxyusername string$proxypassword int$authtype This method enables calling servers via an HTTP proxy. The proxyusername, proxypassword and authtype parameters are optional. Authtype defaults to CURLAUTH_BASIC (Basic authentication protocol); the only other valid value is the constant CURLAUTH_NTLM, and has effect only when the client uses the HTTP 1.1 protocol. NB: CURL versions before 7.11.10 cannot use a proxy to communicate with https servers. setRequestCompression voidsetRequestCompression string$compressionmethod This method defines whether the xml payload forming the request body will be sent to the server in compressed format, as per the HTTP specification. This is particularly useful for large request parameters and over slow network connections. Allowed values for compressionmethod are: 'gzip', 'deflate', 'any' or null (with any meaning either gzip or deflate). Note that there is no automatic fallback mechanism in place for errors due to servers not supporting receiving compressed request bodies, so make sure that the particular server you are querying does accept compressed requests before turning it on. This requires the "zlib" extension to be enabled in your php install. setSSLVerifyHost voidsetSSLVerifyHost int$i This method defines whether connections made to XML-RPC backends via HTTPS should verify the remote host's SSL certificate's common name (CN). By default, only the existence of a CN is checked. $i should be an integer value; 0 to not check the CN at all, 1 to merely check for its existence, and 2 to check that the CN on the certificate matches the hostname that is being connected to. setSSLVerifyPeer voidsetSSLVerifyPeer bool$i This method defines whether connections made to XML-RPC backends via HTTPS should verify the remote host's SSL certificate, and cause the connection to fail if the cert verification fails. $i should be a boolean value. Default value: TRUE. To specify custom SSL certificates to validate the server with, use the setCaCertificate method. setSSLVersion voidsetSSLVersion int$i This method sets the SSL version to be used when making https calls. See the PHP manual for CURLOPT_SSLVERSION for a description of the allowed values. setUserAgent voidUseragent string$useragent This method sets a custom user-agent that will be used by the client in the http headers sent with the request. The default value is built using the library name and version constants. Variables NB: direct manipulation of these variables is only recommended for advanced users. no_multicall This member variable determines whether the multicall() method will try to take advantage of the system.multicall xmlrpc method to dispatch to the server an array of requests in a single http roundtrip or simply execute many consecutive http calls. Defaults to FALSE, but it will be enabled automatically on the first failure of execution of system.multicall. request_charset_encoding This is the charset encoding that will be used for serializing request sent by the client. If defaults to NULL, which means using US-ASCII and encoding all characters outside of the ASCII range using their xml character entity representation (this has the benefit that line end characters will not be mangled in the transfer, a CR-LF will be preserved as well as a singe LF). Valid values are 'US-ASCII', 'UTF-8' and 'ISO-8859-1' return_type This member variable determines whether the value returned inside an xmlrpcresp object as results of calls to the send() and multicall() methods will be an xmlrpcval object, a plain php value or a raw xml string. Allowed values are 'xmlrpcvals' (the default), 'phpvals' and 'xml'. To allow the user to differentiate between a correct and a faulty response, fault responses will be returned as xmlrpcresp objects in any case. Note that the 'phpvals' setting will yield faster execution times, but some of the information from the original response will be lost. It will be e.g. impossible to tell whether a particular php string value was sent by the server as an xmlrpc string or base64 value. Example usage: $client = new xmlrpc_client("phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net/server.php"); $client->return_type = 'phpvals'; $message = new xmlrpcmsg("examples.getStateName", array(new xmlrpcval(23, "int"))); $resp = $client->send($message); if ($resp->faultCode()) echo 'KO. Error: '.$resp->faultString(); else echo 'OK: got '.$resp->value(); For more details about usage of the 'xml' value, see Appendix A. xmlrpcresp This class is used to contain responses to XML-RPC requests. A server method handler will construct an xmlrpcresp and pass it as a return value. This same value will be returned by the result of an invocation of the send method of the xmlrpc_client class. Creation xmlrpcrespnew xmlrpcresp xmlrpcval$xmlrpcval xmlrpcrespnew xmlrpcresp 0 int$errcode string$err_string The first syntax is used when execution has happened without difficulty: $xmlrpcval is an xmlrpcval value with the result of the method execution contained in it. Alternatively it can be a string containing the xml serialization of the single xml-rpc value result of method execution. The second type of constructor is used in case of failure. errcode and err_string are used to provide indication of what has gone wrong. See for more information on passing error codes. Methods faultCode intfaultCode Returns the integer fault code return from the XML-RPC response. A zero value indicates success, any other value indicates a failure response. faultString stringfaultString Returns the human readable explanation of the fault indicated by $resp->faultCode(). value xmlrpcvalvalue Returns an xmlrpcval object containing the return value sent by the server. If the response's faultCode is non-zero then the value returned by this method should not be used (it may not even be an object). Note: if the xmlrpcresp instance in question has been created by an xmlrpc_client object whose return_type was set to 'phpvals', then a plain php value will be returned instead of an xmlrpcval object. If the return_type was set to 'xml', an xml string will be returned (see the return_type member var above for more details). serialize stringserialize Returns an XML string representation of the response (xml prologue not included). xmlrpc_server The implementation of this class has been kept as simple to use as possible. The constructor for the server basically does all the work. Here's a minimal example: function foo ($xmlrpcmsg) { ... return new xmlrpcresp($some_xmlrpc_val); } class bar { function foobar($xmlrpcmsg) { ... return new xmlrpcresp($some_xmlrpc_val); } } $s = new xmlrpc_server( array( "examples.myFunc1" => array("function" => "foo"), "examples.myFunc2" => array("function" => "bar::foobar"), )); This performs everything you need to do with a server. The single constructor argument is an associative array from xmlrpc method names to php function names. The incoming request is parsed and dispatched to the relevant php function, which is responsible for returning a xmlrpcresp object, that will be serialized back to the caller. Method handler functions Both php functions and class methods can be registered as xmlrpc method handlers. The synopsis of a method handler function is: xmlrpcresp $resp = function (xmlrpcmsg $msg) No text should be echoed 'to screen' by the handler function, or it will break the xml response sent back to the client. This applies also to error and warning messages that PHP prints to screen unless the appropriate parameters have been set in the php.in file. Another way to prevent echoing of errors inside the response and facilitate debugging is to use the server SetDebug method with debug level 3 (see ...). Exceptions thrown duting execution of handler functions are caught by default and a XML-RPC error reponse is generated instead. This behaviour can be finetuned by usage of the exception_handling member variable (see ...). Note that if you implement a method with a name prefixed by system. the handler function will be invoked by the server with two parameters, the first being the server itself and the second being the xmlrpcmsg object. The same php function can be registered as handler of multiple xmlrpc methods. Here is a more detailed example of what the handler function foo may do: function foo ($xmlrpcmsg) { global $xmlrpcerruser; // import user errcode base value $meth = $xmlrpcmsg->method(); // retrieve method name $par = $xmlrpcmsg->getParam(0); // retrieve value of first parameter - assumes at least one param received $val = $par->scalarval(); // decode value of first parameter - assumes it is a scalar value ... if ($err) { // this is an error condition return new xmlrpcresp(0, $xmlrpcerruser+1, // user error 1 "There's a problem, Captain"); } else { // this is a successful value being returned return new xmlrpcresp(new xmlrpcval("All's fine!", "string")); } } See server.php in this distribution for more examples of how to do this. Since release 2.0RC3 there is a new, even simpler way of registering php functions with the server. See section 5.7 below The dispatch map The first argument to the xmlrpc_server constructor is an array, called the dispatch map. In this array is the information the server needs to service the XML-RPC methods you define. The dispatch map takes the form of an associative array of associative arrays: the outer array has one entry for each method, the key being the method name. The corresponding value is another associative array, which can have the following members: function - this entry is mandatory. It must be either a name of a function in the global scope which services the XML-RPC method, or an array containing an instance of an object and a static method name (for static class methods the 'class::method' syntax is also supported). signature - this entry is an array containing the possible signatures (see ) for the method. If this entry is present then the server will check that the correct number and type of parameters have been sent for this method before dispatching it. docstring - this entry is a string containing documentation for the method. The documentation may contain HTML markup. signature_docs - this entry can be used to provide documentation for the single parameters. It must match in structure the 'signature' member. By default, only the documenting_xmlrpc_server class in the extras package will take advantage of this, since the "system.methodHelp" protocol does not support documenting method parameters individually. parameters_type - this entry can be used when the server is working in 'xmlrpcvals' mode (see ...) to define one or more entries in the dispatch map as being functions that follow the 'phpvals' calling convention. The only useful value is currently the string phpvals. Look at the server.php example in the distribution to see what a dispatch map looks like. Method signatures A signature is a description of a method's return type and its parameter types. A method may have more than one signature. Within a server's dispatch map, each method has an array of possible signatures. Each signature is an array of types. The first entry is the return type. For instance, the method string examples.getStateName(int) has the signature array($xmlrpcString, $xmlrpcInt) and, assuming that it is the only possible signature for the method, it might be used like this in server creation: $findstate_sig = array(array($xmlrpcString, $xmlrpcInt)); $findstate_doc = 'When passed an integer between 1 and 51 returns the name of a US state, where the integer is the index of that state name in an alphabetic order.'; $s = new xmlrpc_server( array( "examples.getStateName" => array( "function" => "findstate", "signature" => $findstate_sig, "docstring" => $findstate_doc ))); Note that method signatures do not allow to check nested parameters, e.g. the number, names and types of the members of a struct param cannot be validated. If a method that you want to expose has a definite number of parameters, but each of those parameters could reasonably be of multiple types, the array of acceptable signatures will easily grow into a combinatorial explosion. To avoid such a situation, the lib defines the global var $xmlrpcValue, which can be used in method signatures as a placeholder for 'any xmlrpc type': $echoback_sig = array(array($xmlrpcValue, $xmlrpcValue)); $findstate_doc = 'Echoes back to the client the received value, regardless of its type'; $s = new xmlrpc_server( array( "echoBack" => array( "function" => "echoback", "signature" => $echoback_sig, // this sig guarantees that the method handler will be called with one and only one parameter "docstring" => $echoback_doc ))); Methods system.listMethods, system.methodHelp, system.methodSignature and system.multicall are already defined by the server, and should not be reimplemented (see Reserved Methods below). Delaying the server response You may want to construct the server, but for some reason not fulfill the request immediately (security verification, for instance). If you omit to pass to the constructor the dispatch map or pass it a second argument of 0 this will have the desired effect. You can then use the service() method of the server class to service the request. For example: $s = new xmlrpc_server($myDispMap, 0); // second parameter = 0 prevents automatic servicing of request // ... some code that does other stuff here $s->service(); Note that the service method will print the complete result payload to screen and send appropriate HTTP headers back to the client, but also return the response object. This permits further manipulation of the response, possibly in combination with output buffering. To prevent the server from sending HTTP headers back to the client, you can pass a second parameter with a value of TRUE to the service method. In this case, the response payload will be returned instead of the response object. Xmlrpc requests retrieved by other means than HTTP POST bodies can also be processed. For example: $s = new xmlrpc_server(); // not passing a dispatch map prevents automatic servicing of request // ... some code that does other stuff here, including setting dispatch map into server object $resp = $s->service($xmlrpc_request_body, true); // parse a variable instead of POST body, retrieve response payload // ... some code that does other stuff with xml response $resp here Modifying the server behaviour A couple of methods / class variables are available to modify the behaviour of the server. The only way to take advantage of their existence is by usage of a delayed server response (see above) setDebug() This function controls weather the server is going to echo debugging messages back to the client as comments in response body. Valid values: 0,1,2,3, with 1 being the default. At level 0, no debug info is returned to the client. At level 2, the complete client request is added to the response, as part of the xml comments. At level 3, a new PHP error handler is set when executing user functions exposed as server methods, and all non-fatal errors are trapped and added as comments into the response. allow_system_funcs Default_value: TRUE. When set to FALSE, disables support for System.xxx functions in the server. It might be useful e.g. if you do not wish the server to respond to requests to System.ListMethods. compress_response When set to TRUE, enables the server to take advantage of HTTP compression, otherwise disables it. Responses will be transparently compressed, but only when an xmlrpc-client declares its support for compression in the HTTP headers of the request. Note that the ZLIB php extension must be installed for this to work. If it is, compress_response will default to TRUE. exception_handling This variable controls the behaviour of the server when an exception is thrown by a method handler php function. Valid values: 0,1,2, with 0 being the default. At level 0, the server catches the exception and return an 'internal error' xmlrpc response; at 1 it catches the exceptions and return an xmlrpc response with the error code and error message corresponding to the exception that was thron; at 2 = the exception is floated to the upper layers in the code response_charset_encoding Charset encoding to be used for response (only affects string values). If it can, the server will convert the generated response from internal_encoding to the intended one. Valid values are: a supported xml encoding (only UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 at present, unless mbstring is enabled), null (leave charset unspecified in response and convert output stream to US_ASCII), 'default' (use xmlrpc library default as specified in xmlrpc.inc, convert output stream if needed), or 'auto' (use client-specified charset encoding or same as request if request headers do not specify it (unless request is US-ASCII: then use library default anyway). Fault reporting Fault codes for your servers should start at the value indicated by the global $xmlrpcerruser + 1. Standard errors returned by the server include: 1 Unknown method Returned if the server was asked to dispatch a method it didn't know about 2 Invalid return payload This error is actually generated by the client, not server, code, but signifies that a server returned something it couldn't understand. A more detailed error report is sometimes added onto the end of the phrase above. 3 Incorrect parameters This error is generated when the server has signature(s) defined for a method, and the parameters passed by the client do not match any of signatures. 4 Can't introspect: method unknown This error is generated by the builtin system.* methods when any kind of introspection is attempted on a method undefined by the server. 5 Didn't receive 200 OK from remote server This error is generated by the client when a remote server doesn't return HTTP/1.1 200 OK in response to a request. A more detailed error report is added onto the end of the phrase above. 6 No data received from server This error is generated by the client when a remote server returns HTTP/1.1 200 OK in response to a request, but no response body follows the HTTP headers. 7 No SSL support compiled in This error is generated by the client when trying to send a request with HTTPS and the CURL extension is not available to PHP. 8 CURL error This error is generated by the client when trying to send a request with HTTPS and the HTTPS communication fails. 9-14 multicall errors These errors are generated by the server when something fails inside a system.multicall request. 100- XML parse errors Returns 100 plus the XML parser error code for the fault that occurred. The faultString returned explains where the parse error was in the incoming XML stream. 'New style' servers In the same spirit of simplification that inspired the xmlrpc_client::return_type class variable, a new class variable has been added to the server class: functions_parameters_type. When set to 'phpvals', the functions registered in the server dispatch map will be called with plain php values as parameters, instead of a single xmlrpcmsg instance parameter. The return value of those functions is expected to be a plain php value, too. An example is worth a thousand words: function foo($usr_id, $out_lang='en') { global $xmlrpcerruser; ... if ($someErrorCondition) return new xmlrpcresp(0, $xmlrpcerruser+1, 'DOH!'); else return array( 'name' => 'Joe', 'age' => 27, 'picture' => new xmlrpcval(file_get_contents($picOfTheGuy), 'base64') ); } $s = new xmlrpc_server( array( "examples.myFunc" => array( "function" => "bar::foobar", "signature" => array( array($xmlrpcString, $xmlrpcInt), array($xmlrpcString, $xmlrpcInt, $xmlrpcString) ) ) ), false); $s->functions_parameters_type = 'phpvals'; $s->service(); There are a few things to keep in mind when using this simplified syntax: to return an xmlrpc error, the method handler function must return an instance of xmlrpcresp. The only other way for the server to know when an error response should be served to the client is to throw an exception and set the server's exception_handling memeber var to 1; to return a base64 value, the method handler function must encode it on its own, creating an instance of an xmlrpcval object; the method handler function cannot determine the name of the xmlrpc method it is serving, unlike standard handler functions that can retrieve it from the message object; when receiving nested parameters, the method handler function has no way to distinguish a php string that was sent as base64 value from one that was sent as a string value; this has a direct consequence on the support of system.multicall: a method whose signature contains datetime or base64 values will not be available to multicall calls; last but not least, the direct parsing of xml to php values is much faster than using xmlrpcvals, and allows the library to handle much bigger messages without allocating all available server memory or smashing PHP recursive call stack. Global variables Many global variables are defined in the xmlrpc.inc file. Some of those are meant to be used as constants (and modifying their value might cause unpredictable behaviour), while some others can be modified in your php scripts to alter the behaviour of the xml-rpc client and server. "Constant" variables $xmlrpcerruser $xmlrpcerruser 800 The minimum value for errors reported by user implemented XML-RPC servers. Error numbers lower than that are reserved for library usage. $xmlrpcI4, $xmlrpcInt, $xmlrpcBoolean, $xmlrpcDouble, $xmlrpcString, $xmlrpcDateTime, $xmlrpcBase64, $xmlrpcArray, $xmlrpcStruct, $xmlrpcValue, $xmlrpcNull For convenience the strings representing the XML-RPC types have been encoded as global variables: $xmlrpcI4="i4"; $xmlrpcInt="int"; $xmlrpcBoolean="boolean"; $xmlrpcDouble="double"; $xmlrpcString="string"; $xmlrpcDateTime="dateTime.iso8601"; $xmlrpcBase64="base64"; $xmlrpcArray="array"; $xmlrpcStruct="struct"; $xmlrpcValue="undefined"; $xmlrpcNull="null"; $xmlrpcTypes, $xmlrpc_valid_parents, $xmlrpcerr, $xmlrpcstr, $xmlrpcerrxml, $xmlrpc_backslash, $_xh, $xml_iso88591_Entities, $xmlEntities, $xmlrpcs_capabilities Reserved for internal usage. Variables whose value can be modified xmlrpc_defencoding $xmlrpc_defencoding "UTF8" This variable defines the character set encoding that will be used by the xml-rpc client and server to decode the received messages, when a specific charset declaration is not found (in the messages sent non-ascii chars are always encoded using character references, so that the produced xml is valid regardless of the charset encoding assumed). Allowed values: "UTF8", "ISO-8859-1", "ASCII". Note that the appropriate RFC actually mandates that XML received over HTTP without indication of charset encoding be treated as US-ASCII, but many servers and clients 'in the wild' violate the standard, and assume the default encoding is UTF-8. xmlrpc_internalencoding $xmlrpc_internalencoding "ISO-8859-1" This variable defines the character set encoding that the library uses to transparently encode into valid XML the xml-rpc values created by the user and to re-encode the received xml-rpc values when it passes them to the PHP application. It only affects xml-rpc values of string type. It is a separate value from xmlrpc_defencoding, allowing e.g. to send/receive xml messages encoded on-the-wire in US-ASCII and process them as UTF-8. It defaults to the character set used internally by PHP (unless you are running an MBString-enabled installation), so you should change it only in special situations, if e.g. the string values exchanged in the xml-rpc messages are directly inserted into / fetched from a database configured to return UTF8 encoded strings to PHP. Example usage: <?php include('xmlrpc.inc'); $xmlrpc_internalencoding = 'UTF-8'; // this has to be set after the inclusion above $v = new xmlrpcval('κόσμε'); // This xmlrpc value will be correctly serialized as the greek word 'kosme' xmlrpcName $xmlrpcName "XML-RPC for PHP" The string representation of the name of the XML-RPC for PHP library. It is used by the client for building the User-Agent HTTP header that is sent with every request to the server. You can change its value if you need to customize the User-Agent string. xmlrpcVersion $xmlrpcVersion "2.2" The string representation of the version number of the XML-RPC for PHP library in use. It is used by the client for building the User-Agent HTTP header that is sent with every request to the server. You can change its value if you need to customize the User-Agent string. xmlrpc_null_extension When set to TRUE, the lib will enable support for the <NIL/> (and <EX:NIL/>) xmlrpc value, as per the extension to the standard proposed here. This means that <NIL/> and <EX:NIL/> tags received will be parsed as valid xmlrpc, and the corresponding xmlrpcvals will return "null" for scalarTyp(). xmlrpc_null_apache_encoding When set to TRUE, php NULL values encoded into xmlrpcval objects get serialized using the <EX:NIL/> tag instead of <NIL/>. Please note that both forms are always accepted as input regardless of the value of this variable. Helper functions XML-RPC for PHP contains some helper functions which you can use to make processing of XML-RPC requests easier. Date functions The XML-RPC specification has this to say on dates:
Don't assume a timezone. It should be specified by the server in its documentation what assumptions it makes about timezones.
Unfortunately, this means that date processing isn't straightforward. Although XML-RPC uses ISO 8601 format dates, it doesn't use the timezone specifier. We strongly recommend that in every case where you pass dates in XML-RPC calls, you use UTC (GMT) as your timezone. Most computer languages include routines for handling GMT times natively, and you won't have to translate between timezones. For more information about dates, see ISO 8601: The Right Format for Dates, which has a handy link to a PDF of the ISO 8601 specification. Note that XML-RPC uses exactly one of the available representations: CCYYMMDDTHH:MM:SS. iso8601_encode stringiso8601_encode string$time_t int$utc0 Returns an ISO 8601 formatted date generated from the UNIX timestamp $time_t, as returned by the PHP function time(). The argument $utc can be omitted, in which case it defaults to 0. If it is set to 1, then the function corrects the time passed in for UTC. Example: if you're in the GMT-6:00 timezone and set $utc, you will receive a date representation six hours ahead of your local time. The included demo program vardemo.php includes a demonstration of this function. iso8601_decode intiso8601_decode string$isoString int$utc0 Returns a UNIX timestamp from an ISO 8601 encoded time and date string passed in. If $utc is 1 then $isoString is assumed to be in the UTC timezone, and thus the result is also UTC: otherwise, the timezone is assumed to be your local timezone and you receive a local timestamp. Easy use with nested PHP values Dan Libby was kind enough to contribute two helper functions that make it easier to translate to and from PHP values. This makes it easier to deal with complex structures. At the moment support is limited to int, double, string, array, datetime and struct datatypes; note also that all PHP arrays are encoded as structs, except arrays whose keys are integer numbers starting with 0 and incremented by 1. These functions reside in xmlrpc.inc. php_xmlrpc_decode mixedphp_xmlrpc_decode xmlrpcval$xmlrpc_val array$options arrayphp_xmlrpc_decode xmlrpcmsg$xmlrpcmsg_val string$options Returns a native PHP value corresponding to the values found in the xmlrpcval $xmlrpc_val, translated into PHP types. Base-64 and datetime values are automatically decoded to strings. In the second form, returns an array containing the parameters of the given xmlrpcmsg_val, decoded to php types. The options parameter is optional. If specified, it must consist of an array of options to be enabled in the decoding process. At the moment the only valid option are decode_php_objs and dates_as_objects. When the first is set, php objects that have been converted to xml-rpc structs using the php_xmlrpc_encode function and a corresponding encoding option will be converted back into object values instead of arrays (provided that the class definition is available at reconstruction time). When the second is set, XML-RPC datetime values will be converted into native dateTime objects instead of strings. WARNING: please take extreme care before enabling the decode_php_objs option: when php objects are rebuilt from the received xml, their constructor function will be silently invoked. This means that you are allowing the remote end to trigger execution of uncontrolled PHP code on your server, opening the door to code injection exploits. Only enable this option when you have complete trust of the remote server/client. Example: // wrapper to expose an existing php function as xmlrpc method handler function foo_wrapper($m) { $params = php_xmlrpc_decode($m); $retval = call_user_func_array('foo', $params); return new xmlrpcresp(new xmlrpcval($retval)); // foo return value will be serialized as string } $s = new xmlrpc_server(array( "examples.myFunc1" => array( "function" => "foo_wrapper", "signatures" => ... ))); php_xmlrpc_encode xmlrpcvalphp_xmlrpc_encode mixed$phpval array$options Returns an xmlrpcval object populated with the PHP values in $phpval. Works recursively on arrays and objects, encoding numerically indexed php arrays into array-type xmlrpcval objects and non numerically indexed php arrays into struct-type xmlrpcval objects. Php objects are encoded into struct-type xmlrpcvals, excepted for php values that are already instances of the xmlrpcval class or descendants thereof, which will not be further encoded. Note that there's no support for encoding php values into base-64 values. Encoding of date-times is optionally carried on on php strings with the correct format. The options parameter is optional. If specified, it must consist of an array of options to be enabled in the encoding process. At the moment the only valid options are encode_php_objs, null_extension and auto_dates. The first will enable the creation of 'particular' xmlrpcval objects out of php objects, that add a "php_class" xml attribute to their serialized representation. This attribute allows the function php_xmlrpc_decode to rebuild the native php objects (provided that the same class definition exists on both sides of the communication). The second allows to encode php NULL values to the <NIL/> (or <EX:NIL/>, see ...) tag. The last encodes any string that matches the ISO8601 format into an XML-RPC datetime. Example: // the easy way to build a complex xml-rpc struct, showing nested base64 value and datetime values $val = php_xmlrpc_encode(array( 'first struct_element: an int' => 666, 'second: an array' => array ('apple', 'orange', 'banana'), 'third: a base64 element' => new xmlrpcval('hello world', 'base64'), 'fourth: a datetime' => '20060107T01:53:00' ), array('auto_dates')); php_xmlrpc_decode_xml xmlrpcval | xmlrpcresp | xmlrpcmsgphp_xmlrpc_decode_xml string$xml array$options Decodes the xml representation of either an xmlrpc request, response or single value, returning the corresponding php-xmlrpc object, or FALSE in case of an error. The options parameter is optional. If specified, it must consist of an array of options to be enabled in the decoding process. At the moment, no option is supported. Example: $text = '<value><array><data><value>Hello world</value></data></array></value>'; $val = php_xmlrpc_decode_xml($text); if ($val) echo 'Found a value of type '.$val->kindOf(); else echo 'Found invalid xml'; Automatic conversion of php functions into xmlrpc methods (and vice versa) For the extremely lazy coder, helper functions have been added that allow to convert a php function into an xmlrpc method, and a remotely exposed xmlrpc method into a local php function - or a set of methods into a php class. Note that these comes with many caveat. wrap_xmlrpc_method stringwrap_xmlrpc_method $client $methodname $extra_options stringwrap_xmlrpc_method $client $methodname $signum $timeout $protocol $funcname Given an xmlrpc server and a method name, creates a php wrapper function that will call the remote method and return results using native php types for both params and results. The generated php function will return an xmlrpcresp object for failed xmlrpc calls. The second syntax is deprecated, and is listed here only for backward compatibility. The server must support the system.methodSignature xmlrpc method call for this function to work. The client param must be a valid xmlrpc_client object, previously created with the address of the target xmlrpc server, and to which the preferred communication options have been set. The optional parameters can be passed as array key,value pairs in the extra_options param. The signum optional param has the purpose of indicating which method signature to use, if the given server method has multiple signatures (defaults to 0). The timeout and protocol optional params are the same as in the xmlrpc_client::send() method. If set, the optional new_function_name parameter indicates which name should be used for the generated function. In case it is not set the function name will be auto-generated. If the return_source optional parameter is set, the function will return the php source code to build the wrapper function, instead of evaluating it (useful to save the code and use it later as stand-alone xmlrpc client). If the encode_php_objs optional parameter is set, instances of php objects later passed as parameters to the newly created function will receive a 'special' treatment that allows the server to rebuild them as php objects instead of simple arrays. Note that this entails using a "slightly augmented" version of the xmlrpc protocol (ie. using element attributes), which might not be understood by xmlrpc servers implemented using other libraries. If the decode_php_objs optional parameter is set, instances of php objects that have been appropriately encoded by the server using a coordinate option will be deserialized as php objects instead of simple arrays (the same class definition should be present server side and client side). Note that this might pose a security risk, since in order to rebuild the object instances their constructor method has to be invoked, and this means that the remote server can trigger execution of unforeseen php code on the client: not really a code injection, but almost. Please enable this option only when you trust the remote server. In case of an error during generation of the wrapper function, FALSE is returned, otherwise the name (or source code) of the new function. Known limitations: server must support system.methodsignature for the wanted xmlrpc method; for methods that expose multiple signatures, only one can be picked; for remote calls with nested xmlrpc params, the caller of the generated php function has to encode on its own the params passed to the php function if these are structs or arrays whose (sub)members include values of type base64. Note: calling the generated php function 'might' be slow: a new xmlrpc client is created on every invocation and an xmlrpc-connection opened+closed. An extra 'debug' param is appended to the parameter list of the generated php function, useful for debugging purposes. Example usage: $c = new xmlrpc_client('http://phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net/server.php'); $function = wrap_xmlrpc_method($client, 'examples.getStateName'); if (!$function) die('Cannot introspect remote method'); else { $stateno = 15; $statename = $function($a); if (is_a($statename, 'xmlrpcresp')) // call failed { echo 'Call failed: '.$statename->faultCode().'. Calling again with debug on'; $function($a, true); } else echo "OK, state nr. $stateno is $statename"; } wrap_php_function arraywrap_php_function string$funcname string$wrapper_function_name array$extra_options Given a user-defined PHP function, create a PHP 'wrapper' function that can be exposed as xmlrpc method from an xmlrpc_server object and called from remote clients, and return the appropriate definition to be added to a server's dispatch map. The optional $wrapper_function_name specifies the name that will be used for the auto-generated function. Since php is a typeless language, to infer types of input and output parameters, it relies on parsing the javadoc-style comment block associated with the given function. Usage of xmlrpc native types (such as datetime.dateTime.iso8601 and base64) in the docblock @param tag is also allowed, if you need the php function to receive/send data in that particular format (note that base64 encoding/decoding is transparently carried out by the lib, while datetime vals are passed around as strings). Known limitations: only works for user-defined functions, not for PHP internal functions (reflection does not support retrieving number/type of params for those); the wrapped php function will not be able to programmatically return an xmlrpc error response. If the return_source optional parameter is set, the function will return the php source code to build the wrapper function, instead of evaluating it (useful to save the code and use it later in a stand-alone xmlrpc server). It will be in the stored in the source member of the returned array. If the suppress_warnings optional parameter is set, any runtime warning generated while processing the user-defined php function will be catched and not be printed in the generated xml response. If the extra_options array contains the encode_php_objs value, wrapped functions returning php objects will generate "special" xmlrpc responses: when the xmlrpc decoding of those responses is carried out by this same lib, using the appropriate param in php_xmlrpc_decode(), the objects will be rebuilt. In short: php objects can be serialized, too (except for their resource members), using this function. Other libs might choke on the very same xml that will be generated in this case (i.e. it has a nonstandard attribute on struct element tags) If the decode_php_objs optional parameter is set, instances of php objects that have been appropriately encoded by the client using a coordinate option will be deserialized and passed to the user function as php objects instead of simple arrays (the same class definition should be present server side and client side). Note that this might pose a security risk, since in order to rebuild the object instances their constructor method has to be invoked, and this means that the remote client can trigger execution of unforeseen php code on the server: not really a code injection, but almost. Please enable this option only when you trust the remote clients. Example usage: /** * State name from state number decoder. NB: do NOT remove this comment block. * @param integer $stateno the state number * @return string the name of the state (or error description) */ function findstate($stateno) { global $stateNames; if (isset($stateNames[$stateno-1])) { return $stateNames[$stateno-1]; } else { return "I don't have a state for the index '" . $stateno . "'"; } } // wrap php function, build xmlrpc server $methods = array(); $findstate_sig = wrap_php_function('findstate'); if ($findstate_sig) $methods['examples.getStateName'] = $findstate_sig; $srv = new xmlrpc_server($methods); Functions removed from the library The following two functions have been deprecated in version 1.1 of the library, and removed in version 2, in order to avoid conflicts with the EPI xml-rpc library, which also defines two functions with the same names. To ease the transition to the new naming scheme and avoid breaking existing implementations, the following scheme has been adopted: If EPI-XMLRPC is not active in the current PHP installation, the constant XMLRPC_EPI_ENABLED will be set to '0' If EPI-XMLRPC is active in the current PHP installation, the constant XMLRPC_EPI_ENABLED will be set to '1' The following documentation is kept for historical reference: xmlrpc_decode mixedxmlrpc_decode xmlrpcval$xmlrpc_val Alias for php_xmlrpc_decode. xmlrpc_encode xmlrpcvalxmlrpc_encode mixed$phpval Alias for php_xmlrpc_encode. Debugging aids xmlrpc_debugmsg voidxmlrpc_debugmsg string$debugstring Sends the contents of $debugstring in XML comments in the server return payload. If a PHP client has debugging turned on, the user will be able to see server debug information. Use this function in your methods so you can pass back diagnostic information. It is only available from xmlrpcs.inc. Reserved methods In order to extend the functionality offered by XML-RPC servers without impacting on the protocol, reserved methods are supported in this release. All methods starting with system. are considered reserved by the server. PHP for XML-RPC itself provides four special methods, detailed in this chapter. Note that all server objects will automatically respond to clients querying these methods, unless the property allow_system_funcs has been set to false before calling the service() method. This might pose a security risk if the server is exposed to public access, e.g. on the internet. system.getCapabilities system.listMethods This method may be used to enumerate the methods implemented by the XML-RPC server. The system.listMethods method requires no parameters. It returns an array of strings, each of which is the name of a method implemented by the server. system.methodSignature This method takes one parameter, the name of a method implemented by the XML-RPC server. It returns an array of possible signatures for this method. A signature is an array of types. The first of these types is the return type of the method, the rest are parameters. Multiple signatures (i.e. overloading) are permitted: this is the reason that an array of signatures are returned by this method. Signatures themselves are restricted to the top level parameters expected by a method. For instance if a method expects one array of structs as a parameter, and it returns a string, its signature is simply "string, array". If it expects three integers, its signature is "string, int, int, int". For parameters that can be of more than one type, the "undefined" string is supported. If no signature is defined for the method, a not-array value is returned. Therefore this is the way to test for a non-signature, if $resp below is the response object from a method call to system.methodSignature: $v = $resp->value(); if ($v->kindOf() != "array") { // then the method did not have a signature defined } See the introspect.php demo included in this distribution for an example of using this method. system.methodHelp This method takes one parameter, the name of a method implemented by the XML-RPC server. It returns a documentation string describing the use of that method. If no such string is available, an empty string is returned. The documentation string may contain HTML markup. system.multicall This method takes one parameter, an array of 'request' struct types. Each request struct must contain a methodName member of type string and a params member of type array, and corresponds to the invocation of the corresponding method. It returns a response of type array, with each value of the array being either an error struct (containing the faultCode and faultString members) or the successful response value of the corresponding single method call. Examples The best examples are to be found in the sample files included with the distribution. Some are included here. XML-RPC client: state name query Code to get the corresponding state name from a number (1-50) from the demo server available on SourceForge $m = new xmlrpcmsg('examples.getStateName', array(new xmlrpcval($HTTP_POST_VARS["stateno"], "int"))); $c = new xmlrpc_client("/server.php", "phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net", 80); $r = $c->send($m); if (!$r->faultCode()) { $v = $r->value(); print "State number " . htmlentities($HTTP_POST_VARS["stateno"]) . " is " . htmlentities($v->scalarval()) . "<BR>"; print "<HR>I got this value back<BR><PRE>" . htmlentities($r->serialize()) . "</PRE><HR>\n"; } else { print "Fault <BR>"; print "Code: " . htmlentities($r->faultCode()) . "<BR>" . "Reason: '" . htmlentities($r->faultString()) . "'<BR>"; } Executing a multicall call To be documented... Frequently Asked Questions How to send custom XML as payload of a method call Unfortunately, at the time the XML-RPC spec was designed, support for namespaces in XML was not as ubiquitous as it is now. As a consequence, no support was provided in the protocol for embedding XML elements from other namespaces into an xmlrpc request. To send an XML "chunk" as payload of a method call or response, two options are available: either send the complete XML block as a string xmlrpc value, or as a base64 value. Since the '<' character in string values is encoded as '&lt;' in the xml payload of the method call, the XML string will not break the surrounding xmlrpc, unless characters outside of the assumed character set are used. The second method has the added benefits of working independently of the charset encoding used for the xml to be transmitted, and preserving exactly whitespace, whilst incurring in some extra message length and cpu load (for carrying out the base64 encoding/decoding). Is there any limitation on the size of the requests / responses that can be successfully sent? Yes. But I have no hard figure to give; it most likely will depend on the version of PHP in usage and its configuration. Keep in mind that this library is not optimized for speed nor for memory usage. Better alternatives exist when there are strict requirements on throughput or resource usage, such as the php native xmlrpc extension (see the PHP manual for more information). Keep in mind also that HTTP is probably not the best choice in such a situation, and XML is a deadly enemy. CSV formatted data over socket would be much more efficient. If you really need to move a massive amount of data around, and you are crazy enough to do it using phpxmlrpc, your best bet is to bypass usage of the xmlrpcval objects, at least in the decoding phase, and have the server (or client) object return to the calling function directly php values (see xmlrpc_client::return_type and xmlrpc_server::functions_parameters_type for more details). My server (client) returns an error whenever the client (server) returns accented characters To be documented... How to enable long-lasting method calls To be documented... My client returns "XML-RPC Fault #2: Invalid return payload: enable debugging to examine incoming payload": what should I do? The response you are seeing is a default error response that the client object returns to the php application when the server did not respond to the call with a valid xmlrpc response. The most likely cause is that you are not using the correct URL when creating the client object, or you do not have appropriate access rights to the web page you are requesting, or some other common http misconfiguration. To find out what the server is really returning to your client, you have to enable the debug mode of the client, using $client->setdebug(1); How can I save to a file the xml of the xmlrpc responses received from servers? If what you need is to save the responses received from the server as xml, you have two options: 1- use the serialize() method on the response object. $resp = $client->send($msg); if (!$resp->faultCode()) $data_to_be_saved = $resp->serialize(); Note that this will not be 100% accurate, since the xml generated by the response object can be different from the xml received, especially if there is some character set conversion involved, or such (eg. if you receive an empty string tag as <string/>, serialize() will output <string></string>), or if the server sent back as response something invalid (in which case the xml generated client side using serialize() will correspond to the error response generated internally by the lib). 2 - set the client object to return the raw xml received instead of the decoded objects: $client = new xmlrpc_client($url); $client->return_type = 'xml'; $resp = $client->send($msg); if (!$resp->faultCode()) $data_to_be_saved = $resp->value(); Note that using this method the xml response response will not be parsed at all by the library, only the http communication protocol will be checked. This means that xmlrpc responses sent by the server that would have generated an error response on the client (eg. malformed xml, responses that have faultcode set, etc...) now will not be flagged as invalid, and you might end up saving not valid xml but random junk... Can I use the ms windows character set? If the data your application is using comes from a Microsoft application, there are some chances that the character set used to encode it is CP1252 (the same might apply to data received from an external xmlrpc server/client, but it is quite rare to find xmlrpc toolkits that encode to CP1252 instead of UTF8). It is a character set which is "almost" compatible with ISO 8859-1, but for a few extra characters. PHP-XMLRPC only supports the ISO 8859-1 and UTF8 character sets. The net result of this situation is that those extra characters will not be properly encoded, and will be received at the other end of the XML-RPC transmission as "garbled data". Unfortunately the library cannot provide real support for CP1252 because of limitations in the PHP 4 xml parser. Luckily, we tried our best to support this character set anyway, and, since version 2.2.1, there is some form of support, left commented in the code. To properly encode outgoing data that is natively in CP1252, you will have to uncomment all relative code in the file xmlrpc.inc (you can search for the string "1252"), then set $GLOBALS['xmlrpc_internalencoding']='CP1252'; Please note that all incoming data will then be fed to your application as UTF-8 to avoid any potential data loss. Does the library support using cookies / http sessions? In short: yes, but a little coding is needed to make it happen. The code below uses sessions to e.g. let the client store a value on the server and retrieve it later. $resp = $client->send(new xmlrpcmsg('registervalue', array(new xmlrpcval('foo'), new xmlrpcval('bar')))); if (!$resp->faultCode()) { $cookies = $resp->cookies(); if (array_key_exists('PHPSESSID', $cookies)) // nb: make sure to use the correct session cookie name { $session_id = $cookies['PHPSESSID']['value']; // do some other stuff here... $client->setcookie('PHPSESSID', $session_id); $val = $client->send(new xmlrpcmsg('getvalue', array(new xmlrpcval('foo'))); } } Server-side sessions are handled normally like in any other php application. Please see the php manual for more information about sessions. NB: unlike web browsers, not all xmlrpc clients support usage of http cookies. If you have troubles with sessions and control only the server side of the communication, please check with the makers of the xmlrpc client in use. Integration with the PHP xmlrpc extension To be documented more... In short: for the fastest execution possible, you can enable the php native xmlrpc extension, and use it in conjunction with phpxmlrpc. The following code snippet gives an example of such integration /*** client side ***/ $c = new xmlrpc_client('http://phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net/server.php'); // tell the client to return raw xml as response value $c->return_type = 'xml'; // let the native xmlrpc extension take care of encoding request parameters $r = $c->send(xmlrpc_encode_request('examples.getStateName', $_POST['stateno'])); if ($r->faultCode()) // HTTP transport error echo 'Got error '.$r->faultCode(); else { // HTTP request OK, but XML returned from server not parsed yet $v = xmlrpc_decode($r->value()); // check if we got a valid xmlrpc response from server if ($v === NULL) echo 'Got invalid response'; else // check if server sent a fault response if (xmlrpc_is_fault($v)) echo 'Got xmlrpc fault '.$v['faultCode']; else echo'Got response: '.htmlentities($v); } Substitution of the PHP xmlrpc extension Yet another interesting situation is when you are using a ready-made php application, that provides support for the XMLRPC protocol via the native php xmlrpc extension, but the extension is not available on your php install (e.g. because of shared hosting constraints). Since version 2.1, the PHP-XMLRPC library provides a compatibility layer that aims to be 100% compliant with the xmlrpc extension API. This means that any code written to run on the extension should obtain the exact same results, albeit using more resources and a longer processing time, using the PHP-XMLRPC library and the extension compatibility module. The module is part of the EXTRAS package, available as a separate download from the sourceforge.net website, since version 0.2 'Enough of xmlrpcvals!': new style library usage To be documented... In the meantime, see docs about xmlrpc_client::return_type and xmlrpc_server::functions_parameters_types, as well as php_xmlrpc_encode, php_xmlrpc_decode and php_xmlrpc_decode_xml Usage of the debugger A webservice debugger is included in the library to help during development and testing. The interface should be self-explicative enough to need little documentation. The most useful feature of the debugger is without doubt the "Show debug info" option. It allows to have a screen dump of the complete http communication between client and server, including the http headers as well as the request and response payloads, and is invaluable when troubleshooting problems with charset encoding, authentication or http compression. The debugger can take advantage of the JSONRPC library extension, to allow debugging of JSON-RPC webservices, and of the JS-XMLRPC library visual editor to allow easy mouse-driven construction of the payload for remote methods. Both components have to be downloaded separately from the sourceforge.net web pages and copied to the debugger directory to enable the extra functionality: to enable jsonrpc functionality, download the PHP-XMLRPC EXTRAS package, and copy the file jsonrpc.inc either to the same directory as the debugger or somewhere in your php include path to enable the visual value editing dialog, download the JS-XMLRPC library, and copy somewhere in the web root files visualeditor.php, visualeditor.css and the folders yui and img. Then edit the debugger file controller.php and set appropriately the variable $editorpath.