How to send XML-RPC messages to Xindice 1.1

This is meant to complement and continue from where Tom Dyson's Getting started with Xindice 1.1 left off. It also relates to HOWTO Xindice 1.1b and Cocoon 2.

This document is incomplete and in progress. Please let the author know of any problems and errors.

In very brief

Here's a very brief outline of how to do Xindice 1.1 XML-RPC, with Java examples.

• point your XML-RPC client to "http://url:port/Xindice".
  Java: XmlRpcClient xClient = new XmlRpcClient("http://localhost:8080/Xindice");
   
• create a hashtable with parameters for the RPC message. Each parameter is a key/value pair, such as ("collection", path-to-collection).
  Java: xHashtable.put("collection", "/db");
   
• put a ("message", name-of-command) parameter into the hashtable.
  Java: xHashtable.put("message", "ListCollections").
   
• create a vector, and add the hashtable to the vector.
  Java: xVector.addElement(xHashtable);
   
• tell your RPC client to ("run", vector).
  Java: Hashtable returnedHash = (Hashtable) xClient.execute("run",xVector);
   
• retrieve the result value with the "result" key, and coerce to the type appropriate to the command. For example:
  Java: Vector cols = (Vector) returnedHash.get("result");
   

Installing Xindice 1.1 with Tomcat

Getting started with Xindice 1.1 details how to:

• check out Xindice 1.1 from CVS
• build the Xindice jar and war files
• move Xindice.war (it must be spelled exactly that) to $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps and restart Tomcat
• test the installation.

Databases will by default be located in:
$TOMCAT_HOME/web-apps/Xindice/WEB-INF/db

Sources

Hashtable Keys

These are some of the keys used for setting RPC command parameters into a hashtable to be read by the server.

Commands

Command names are sent to the Xindice service by adding a hashtable entry with keyword "message" and the name of the command. They invoke Java classes of the same name, located in:
org/apache/xindice/server/rpc/messages/.

Parameters required by the command are added as entries to the hashtable. The table below lists some of the commands and their parameters.