xmlrpc-marshalling

The What

The xmlrpc-marshalling module is a pure JavaScript XML-RPC marshaller and unmarshaller that aims to atomically implement the XML-RPC protocol.

Pure JavaScript means that the XML parsing and XML building use pure JavaScript libraries, so no extra C dependencies or build requirements.

The How

To Install

npm install xmlrpc-marshalling

To Use

Date/Time Formatting

XML-RPC dates are formatted according to ISO 8601. There are a number of formatting options within the boundaries of the standard. The decoder detects those formats and parses them automatically, but for encoding dates to ISO 8601 some options can be specified to match your specific implementation.

The formatting options can be set through xmlrpc.dateFormatter.setOpts(options);, where the options parameter is an object, with the following (optional) boolean members:

• colons - enables/disables formatting the time portion with a colon as separator (default: true)
• hyphens - enables/disables formatting the date portion with a hyphen as separator (default: false)
• local - encode as local time instead of UTC (true = local, false = utc, default: true)
• ms - enables/disables output of milliseconds (default: false)
• offset - enables/disables output of UTC offset in case of local time (default: false)

Default format: 20140101T11:20:00

UTC Example:

xmlrpc.dateFormatter.setOpts({
  colons: true
, hyphens: true
, local: false
, ms: true
}) // encoding output: '2014-01-01T16:20:00.000Z'

Local date + offset example:

xmlrpc.dateFormatter.setOpts({
  colons: true
, hyphens: true
, local: true
, ms: false
, offset: true
}) // encoding output: '2014-01-01T11:20:00-05:00'

Custom Types

If you need to serialize to a specific format or need to handle custom data types that are not supported by default, it is possible to extend the serializer with a user-defined type for your specific needs.

A custom type can be defined as follows:

var xmlrpc = require('xmlrpc');
var util = require('util');
 
// create your custom class
var YourType = function (raw) {
  xmlrpc.CustomType.call(this, raw);
};
 
// inherit everything
util.inherits(YourType, xmlrpc.CustomType);
 
// set a custom tagName (defaults to 'customType')
YourType.prototype.tagName = 'yourType';
 
// optionally, override the serializer
YourType.prototype.serialize = function (xml) {
  var value = somefunction(this.raw);
  return xml.ele(this.tagName).txt(value);
}

and then make your method calls, wrapping your variables inside your new type definition:

var client = xmlrpc.createClient('YOUR_ENDPOINT');
client.methodCall('YOUR_METHOD', [new YourType(yourVariable)], yourCallback);

To Test

XML-RPC implementations must be precise so there are an extensive set of test cases in the test directory. Vows is the testing framework.

To run the test suite:

make test

If submitting a bug fix, please update the appropriate test file too.

The License (MIT)

Released under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for the complete wording.

Contributors

Thank you to all the authors and everyone who has filed an issue to help make xmlrpc better.