root/branches/cherrypy-2.1/docs/book/xml/apireference.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<section xmlns:db="http://docbook.org/docbook-ng" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
         xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xml:id="apireference">
    <title>API reference</title>
    <section id="cherrypy">
        <title>cherrypy.threadData</title>
        <para>This attribute holds attributes that map to this thread only.</para>
    </section>
    <section id="cherrypyrequest">
        <title>cherrypy.request</title>
        <para>The cherrypy.request object contains request-related objects. Pretty lame description,
        but that's all it does; it's a big data dump. At the beginning of each HTTP request, the
        existing request object is destroyed, and a new one is created, (one request object for each
        thread). Therefore, CherryPy (and you yourself) can stick data into cherrypy.request and not
        worry about it conflicting with other requests.</para>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.remoteAddr</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the IP address of the client. It will be an
            empty string if it is not available.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.remotePort</title>
            <para>This attribute is an int containing the TCP port number of the client. It will be
            -1 if it is not available.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.remoteHost</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the remote hostname of the client.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.headerMap</title>
            <para>This attribute is a dictionary containing the received HTTP headers, with
            automatically titled keys (e.g., "Content-Type"). As it's a dictionary, no duplicates are
            allowed.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.headers</title>
            <para>This attribute is a list of (header, value) tuples containing the received HTTP
            headers. In general, you probably want to use headerMap instead; this is only here in
            case you need to inspect duplicates in the request headers.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.requestLine</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the first line of the raw HTTP request; for
            example, "GET /path/page HTTP/1.1".</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.simpleCookie</title>
            <para>This attribute is a SimpleCookie instance from the standard library's Cookie module
            which contains the incoming cookie values from the client.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.rfile</title>
            <para>This attribute is the input stream to the client, if applicable. See
            cherrypy.request.processRequestBody for more information.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.body</title>
            <para>This attribute is the request entity body, if applicable. See
            cherrypy.request.processRequestBody for more information.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.processRequestBody</title>
            <para>This attribute specifies whether or not the request's body (request.rfile, which is
            POST or PUT data) will be handled by CherryPy. If True (the default for POST and PUT
            requests), then request.rfile will be consumed by CherryPy (and unreadable after that).
            If the request Content-Type is "application/x-www-form-urlencoded", then the rfile will
            be parsed and placed into request.paramMap; otherwise, it will be available in
            request.body. If cherrypy.request.processRequestBody is False, then the rfile is not
            consumed, but will be readable by the exposed method.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.method</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the HTTP request method, such as GET or
            POST.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.protocol</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the HTTP protocol of the request in the form
            of HTTP/x.x</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.version</title>
            <para>This attribute is a Version object which represents the HTTP protocol. It's the
            same os request.protocol, but allows easy comparisons like <code>if
            cherrypy.request.version &gt;= "1.1": do_http_1_1_thing</code>.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.queryString</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the query string of the request (the part of
            the URL following '?').</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.path</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the path of the resource the client
            requested.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.paramMap</title>
            <para>This attribute is a dictionary containing the query string and POST arguments of
            this request.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.base</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the root URL of the server. By default, it is
            equal to request.scheme://request.headerMap['Host'].</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.browserUrl</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the URL the client requested. By default, it
            is equal to <code>request.base + request.path</code>, plus the querystring, if
            provided.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.objectPath</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the path of the exposed method that will be
            called to handle this request. This is usually the same as cherrypy.request.path, but can
            be changed in a filter to change which method is actually called.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.originalPath</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the original value of cherrypy.request.path,
            in case it is modified by a filter during the request.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.originalParamMap</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the original value of
            cherrypy.request.paramMap, in case it is modified by a filter during the request.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.request.scheme</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the URL scheme used in this request. It is
            either "http" or "https".</para>
        </section>
    </section>
    <!-- end cherrypy.request section -->
    <section id="cherrypyresponse">
        <title>cherrypy.response</title>
        <para>The cherrypy.response object contains response-related objects. Pretty lame
        description, but that's all it does; it's a big data dump. At the beginning of each HTTP
        request, the existing response object is destroyed, and a new one is created, (one response
        object for each thread). Therefore, CherryPy (and you yourself) can stick data into
        cherrypy.response and not worry about it conflicting with other requests.</para>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.response.headerMap</title>
            <para>This attribute is a dictionary with automatically titled keys (e.g.,
            "Content-Length"). It holds all outgoing HTTP headers to the client.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.response.headers</title>
            <para>This attribute is a list of (header, value) tuples. It's not available until the
            response has been finalized; it's really only there in the extremely rare cases when you
            need duplicate response headers. In general, you should use request.headerMap
            instead.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.response.simpleCookie</title>
            <para>This attribute is a SimpleCookie instance from the standard library's Cookie
            module. It contains the outgoing cookie values.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.response.body</title>
            <para>This attribute is originally just the return value of the exposed method, but by
            the end of the request it must be an iterable (usually a list or generator of strings)
            which will be the content of the HTTP response.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.response.status</title>
            <para>This attribute is a string containing the HTTP response code in the form "###
            Reason-Phrase", i.e. "200 OK". You may also set it to an int, in which case the response
            finalization process will supply a Reason-Phrase for you.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.response.version</title>
            <para>This attribute is a Version object, representing the HTTP protocol version of the
            response. This is not necessarily the value that will be written in the response!
            Instead, it should be used to determine which features are <emphasis>available</emphasis>
            for the response. For example, an HTTP server may send an HTTP/1.1 response even though
            the client is known to only understand HTTP/1.0—the response.version will be set to
            Version("1.0") to inform you of this, so that you (and CherryPy) can restrict the
            response to HTTP/1.0 features only.</para>
        </section>
    </section>
    <section id="cherrypyserver">
        <title>cherrypy.server</title>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.start(initOnly=False, serverClass=_missing)</title>
            <para>Start the CherryPy Server. Simple websites may call this without any arguments, to
            run the default server. If initOnly is False (the default), this function will block
            until KeyboardInterrupt or SystemExit is raised, so that the process will persist. When
            using one of the built-in HTTP servers, you should leave this set to False. You should
            only set it to True if you're running CherryPy as an extension to another HTTP server
            (for example, when using Apache and mod_python with CherryPy), in which case the foreign
            HTTP server should do its own process-management.</para>
            <para>Use the serverClass argument to specify that you wish to use an HTTP server other
            than the default, built-in WSGIServer. If missing, config.get("server.class") will be
            checked for an alternate value; otherwise, the default is used. Possible alternate values
            (you may pass the class names as a string if you wish):</para>
            <itemizedlist>
                <listitem>
                    <para><code>cherrypy._cphttpserver.CherryHTTPServer</code>: this will load the
                    old, single-threaded built-in HTTP server. This server is deprecated and will
                    probably be removed in CherryPy 2.2.</para>
                </listitem>
                <listitem>
                    <para><code>cherrypy._cphttpserver.PooledThreadServer</code>: this will load the
                    old, multi-threaded built-in HTTP server. This server is deprecated and will
                    probably be removed in CherryPy 2.2.</para>
                </listitem>
                <listitem>
                    <para><code>cherrypy._cphttpserver.embedded_server</code>: use this to
                    automatically select between the CherryHTTPServer and the PooledThreadServer
                    based on the value of config.get("server.threadPool") and
                    config.get("server.socketFile").</para>
                </listitem>
                <listitem>
                    <para><code>None</code>: this will not load any HTTP server. Note that this is
                    not the default; the default (if serverClass is not given) is to load the
                    WSGIServer.</para>
                </listitem>
                <listitem>
                    <para>Any other class (or dotted-name string): load a custom HTTP server.</para>
                </listitem>
            </itemizedlist>
            <para>You <emphasis>must</emphasis> call this function from Python's main thread, and set
            initOnly to False, if you want CherryPy to shut down when KeyboardInterrupt or SystemExit
            are raised (including Ctrl-C). The only time you might want to do otherwise is if you run
            CherryPy as a Windows service, or as an extension to, say, mod_python, and even then, you
            might want to anyway.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.blocking</title>
            <para>If the "initOnly" argument to server.start is True, this will be False, and
            vice-versa.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.httpserverclass</title>
            <para>Whatever HTTP server class is set in server.start will be stuck in here.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.httpserver</title>
            <para>Whatever HTTP server class is set in server.start will be instantiated and stuck in
            here.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.state</title>
            <para>One of three values, indicating the state of the server:<itemizedlist>
                    <listitem>
                        <para>STOPPED = 0: The server hasn't been started, and will not accept
                        requests.</para>
                    </listitem>
                    <listitem>
                        <para>STARTING = None: The server is in the process of starting, or an error
                        occured while trying to start the server.</para>
                    </listitem>
                    <listitem>
                        <para>STARTED = 1: The server has started (including an HTTP server if
                        requested), and is ready to receive requests.</para>
                    </listitem>
                </itemizedlist></para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.ready</title>
            <para>True if the server is ready to receive requests, false otherwise. Read-only.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.wait()</title>
            <para>Since server.start usually blocks, other threads need to be started before calling
            server.start; however, they often must wait for server.start to complete it's setup of
            the HTTP server. Use this function from other threads to make them wait for the HTTP
            server to be ready to receive requests.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.start_with_callback(func, args=(), kwargs={},
            serverClass=_missing)</title>
            <para>Since server.start usually blocks, use this to easily run another function in a new
            thread. It starts the new thread and then runs server.start. The new thread automatically
            waits for the server to finish its startup procedure.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.stop()</title>
            <para>Stop the CherryPy Server. Well, "suspend" might be a better term—this doesn't
            terminate the process.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.interrupt</title>
            <para>Usually None, set this to KeyboardInterrupt() or SystemExit() to shut down the
            entire process. That is, the new exception will be raised in the main thread.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.restart()</title>
            <para>Restart the CherryPy Server.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.onStartServerList</title>
            <para>A list of functions that will be called when the server starts.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.onStopServerList</title>
            <para>A list of functions that will be called when the server stops.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.onStartThreadList</title>
            <para>A list of functions that will be called when each request thread is started. Note
            that such threads do not need to be started or controlled by CherryPy; for example, when
            using CherryPy with mod_python, Apache will start and stop the request threads.
            Nevertheless, CherryPy will run the onStartThreadList functions upon the first request
            using each distinct thread.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.onStopThreadList</title>
            <para>A list of functions that will be called when each request thread is stopped.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.server.request()</title>
            <para>HTTP servers should call this function to hand off the HTTP request to the CherryPy
            core. There is no return value; instead, the core sets response content in the
            cherrypy.response object.</para>
        </section>
    </section>
    <!-- end cherrypyserver section -->
    <section id="cherrypyconfig">
        <title>cherrypy.config</title>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.config.get(key, defaultValue = None, returnSection = False)</title>
            <para>This function returns the configuration value for the given key. The function
            checks if the setting is defined for the current request path; it walks up the request
            path until the key is found, or it returns the default value. If returnSection is True,
            the function returns the configuration path where the key is defined instead.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.config.getAll(key)</title>
            <para>The getAll function returns a list containing a (path, value) tuple for all
            occurences of the key within the request path. This function allows applications to
            inherit configuration data defined for parent paths.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.config.update(updateMap=None, file=None)</title>
            <para>Function to update the configuration map. The "updateMap" argument is a dictionary
            of the form {'sectionPath' : { } }. The "file" argument is the path to the configuration
            file.</para>
        </section>
    </section>
    <section id="exceptions">
        <title>cherrypy exceptions</title>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.HTTPError</title>
            <para>This exception can be used to automatically send a response using a http status
            code, with an appropriate error page.</para>
            <section>
                <title>cherrypy.NotFound</title>
                <para>This exception is raised when CherryPy is unable to map a requested path to an
                internal method. It's a subclass of HTTPError.</para>
            </section>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.HTTPRedirect</title>
            <para>This exception will force a HTTP redirect.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.InternalRedirect</title>
            <para>This exception will redirect processing to another path within the site (without
            informing the client).</para>
        </section>
    </section>
    <section id="lib">
        <title>The CherryPy library</title>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.lib.cptools</title>
            <section>
                <title>ExposeItems</title>
                <para>Utility class that exposes a getitem-aware object. It does not provide index()
                or default() methods, and it does not expose the individual item objects - just the
                list or dict that contains them. User-specific index() and default() methods can be
                implemented by inheriting from this class.</para>
            </section>
            <section>
                <title>PositionalParametersAware</title>
                <para>Utility class that restores positional parameters functionality that was found
                in 2.0.0-beta.</para>
            </section>
            <section>
                <title>getRanges(content_length)</title>
                <para>Returns a list of (start, stop) indices from a Range request header. Returns
                None if no such header is provided in the request. Each (start, stop) tuple will be
                composed of two ints, which are suitable for use in a slicing operation. That is, the
                header "Range: bytes=3-6", if applied against a Python string, is requesting
                resource[3:7]. This function will return the list [(3, 7)].</para>
            </section>
            <section>
                <title>serveFile(path, contentType=None, disposition=None, name=None)</title>
                <para>Set status, headers, and body in order to serve the file at the given path. The
                Content-Type header will be set to the contentType arg, if provided. If not provided,
                the Content-Type will be guessed by the extension of the file. If disposition is not
                None, the Content-Disposition header will be set to "&lt;disposition&gt;;
                filename=&lt;name&gt;". If name is None, it will be set to the basename of path. If
                disposition is None, no Content-Disposition header will be written.</para>
            </section>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.lib.covercp</title>
            <para>This module both provides code-coverage tools, and may also be run as a script. To
            use this module, or the coverage tools in the test suite, you need to download
            'coverage.py', either Gareth Rees' <ulink url="???">original implementation</ulink> or
            Ned Batchelder's <ulink
            url="http://www.nedbatchelder.com/code/modules/coverage.html">enhanced
            version</ulink>.</para>
            <para>Set cherrypy.codecoverage to True to turn on coverage tracing. Then, use the
            covercp.serve() function to browse the results in a web browser. If you run this module
            as a script (i.e., from the command line), it will call serve() for you.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.lib.profiler</title>
            <para>You can profile any of your page handlers (exposed methods) as follows:</para>
            <example>
                <title>Profiling example</title>
                <programlisting><code>from cherrypy.lib import profile

class Root:
    p = profile.Profiler("/path/to/profile/dir")
    
    def index(self):
        self.p.run(self._index)
    index.exposed = True
    
    def _index(self):
        return "Hello, world!"

cherrypy.root = Root()</code></programlisting>
            </example>
            <para>Set the config entry: "profiling.on = True" if you'd rather turn on profiling for
            all requests. Then, use the serve() function to browse the results in a web browser. If
            you run this module as a script (i.e., from the command line), it will call serve() for
            you.</para>
            <para>Developers: this module should be used whenever you make significant changes to
            CherryPy, to get a quick sanity-check on the performance of the request process. Basic
            requests should complete in about 5 milliseconds on a reasonably-fast machine running
            Python 2.4 (Python 2.3 will be much slower due to threadlocal being implemented in
            Python, not C). You can profile the test suite by supplying the --profile option to
            test.py.</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>cherrypy.lib.autoreload</title>
            <para>This module provides a brute-force method of reloading application files on the
            fly. When the config entry "autoreload.on" is True (or when "server.environment" is
            "development"), CherryPy uses the autoreload module to restart the current process
            whenever one of the files in use is changed. The mechanism by which it does so is pretty
            complicated:<figure>
                    <title>The autoreload process</title>
                    <mediaobject>
                        <imageobject>
                            <imagedata fileref="autoreload.gif" format="GIF" />
                        </imageobject>
                    </mediaobject>
                </figure></para>
        </section>
    </section>
    <section id="specialfunctions">
        <title>Special functions and attributes</title>
        <section>
            <title>_cpOnError</title>
            <para>_cpOnError is a function for handling unanticipated exceptions, whether raised by
            CherryPy itself, or in user applications. The default simply raises
            HTTPError(500).</para>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>_cpFilterList</title>
            <para>User defined filters are enabled using the class attribute _cpFilterList. Any
            filter instances placed in _cpFilterList will be applied to all methods of the
            class.</para>
        </section>
    </section>
    <section id="filters">
        <title>Filter API</title>
        <section>
            <title>onStartResource</title>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>beforeRequestBody</title>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>beforeMain</title>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>beforeFinalize</title>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>onEndResource</title>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>beforeErrorResponse</title>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>afterErrorResponse</title>
        </section>
    </section>
</section>