Re: JSON-RPC Multiple Invocations

I noticed from a hint that Satoshi dropped in the JSON-RPC password thread about so-called “Multiple Invocation” support in Bitcoin’s JSON-RPC.

As I run a site that polls bitcoind for payments to a large number of addresses twice a minute, I was intrigued. First of all, this isn’t JSON-RPC 2.0’s “Batch” support, where requests are submitted in an array and responses are received the same way […]

As you can see, the server replies with two complete HTTP 200 responses instead of (as I would have expected) one response with the two lines concatenated as I did in the request.

I can’t figure out how to parse that with anything at all semi-automated in Python. urllib2 and httplib both return after the first response and drop the second one on the floor.

Has anyone encountered this problem before? Does anyone know of a Python library that can handle this strange multi-request behaviour?

Obviously it’s a bug that it repeats the header.

I was trying to follow the 1.0 spec: http://json-rpc.org/wiki/specification   It called for multiple invocation.

I think they mean it’s like this, but I’m not sure:

Post:
{“method”: “postMessage”, “params”: [“Hello all!”], “id”: 99}
{“method”: “postMessage”, “params”: [“I have a question:”], “id”: 101}

Reply:
{“result”: 1, “error”: null, “id”: 99}
{“result”: 1, “error”: null, “id”: 101}

I can’t remember where I think I saw that it’s supposed to send back HTTP status 500 for an error reply.  If it contains multiple responses and one is an error, I wonder if that makes the status 500 for the whole thing, I guess so.  Maybe it should always return 200.  I think someone sounded like the 500 might be causing a problem.

This probably gets fixed after 0.3.3.  Until then, just use single invocation.  I wonder if any JSON-RPC package even supports multiple invocation, probably not.

It would be nice if we could pin down better how multiple-invocation is supposed to work, if at all, before trying to fix it, and whether returning HTTP status 500 for error response is right.

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