April 28, 2008

Authenticating Requests for the Phanfare API in Python

Phanfare has decided to implement authenticated requests in a way that feels a bit clunky in design and a bit tricky to figure out how to get working as it isn't well documented.

On the initial Authenticate request call, they send back a cookie string in XML that you are supposed to use in sending an HTTP Header, Cookie, with each subsequent request.

Cookie: phanfare2=COOKIE_STRING; domain=.phanfare.com

Being a Python library, pyphanfare uses urllib's URLopener utility class for the HTTP calls. In order to send a cookie with a URLopener originated request you'll want to do the following:

cookie_str = 'phanfare2=COOKIE_STRING; domain=.phanfare.com'
opener = URLopener()
opener.addheader('Cookie', cookie_str)
xml_str = opener.open(URL).read()