Andy Chase

The XML-RPC calls work as described by the documentation and examples, but they make no mention of what to do if you need to send Base64 dataFor a while it looked like I might actually be able to consolidate my current Rube Goldberg iPhoto to Movable Type solution into a single AppleScript, thanks to OS X's AppleScript Support for Remote Procedure Calls.

The XML-RPC calls work as described by the documentation and examples, but they make no mention of what to do if you need to send Base64 data; in my own tests of the Movable Type metaWeblog.newMediaObject method, a base64 encoded string simply gets handled as a plain text string on the other side, and gets written directly to the file.

On a hunch I tried passing the raw file data as an AppleScript data variable, hoping against hope that the Apple Event handler would take care of the encoding on the fly, but as far as I can tell the raw data also gets passed along as a string, leading to a munged XML-RPC message.

And naturally, there's absolutely nothing out there on the web or usenet regarding this issue... I can't believe I'm the first person to try this, but perhaps those before me have given up in disgust before getting as far as writing about it.

I dropped the good folks at developer.apple.com a note regarding the documentation, politely suggesting that some clarification would be very helpful.. we'll see what happens.

In the meantime, I may as well make the XML-RPC call via PHP with a do shell script statement.

If anyone who comes across this has a solution, I would be most grateful if you could drop me a line with a quick code snippet.