Seeing as how there are a lot of benefits to using djangos own test suite (fixtures and automatic database generation to name a few), i set out to write a little test client for PyAMF to utilize django’s test client, so it would be possible to write a proper test suite.

This turned out great, and is now ticket 508 over at PyAMFs trac. Look at the client.py for the code. At some point, it will be integrated into PyAMF mainline as p.r.c.django.TestClient (or something like that).

Let’s for the fun of it say, that we would like to POST the following piece of XML to a PHP script:

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<request command="run-command" />

Now, the way I’d do that in Actionscript 3, is like this:

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var a:XML = <request command="run-command" />;
var r:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://localhost/service.php");
 
r.data = a;
r.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
r.contentType = "text/xml";
 
var l:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
l.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, function(e:Event) {
    trace("success", l.data);
});
l.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, function(e:Event) {
    trace("failed", e);
});
l.load(r);

But it seems, that older flash players (<= 9,0,45,0) does not call the XML’s toString() or something. The result is, that the URLLoader makes a GET request, which is a bit hard to debug as version 9,0,115,0 does send the XML correctly.

Anyway, the correct way to do it, seems to be to manually call the XML’s .toXMLString() method, like so:

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var a:XML = <request command="run-command" />;
var r:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://localhost/service.php");
 
r.data = a.toXMLString();
r.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
r.contentType = "text/xml";
 
var l:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
l.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, function(e:Event) {
    trace("success", l.data);
});
l.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, function(e:Event) {
    trace("failed", e);
});
l.load(r);