Mozenda Bulk Insertion with Python Script

Question

I'm trying to write a python script to perform a bulk insertion over the Mozenda API. They give an example in C# in the documentation. https://mozenda.com/api#h9

test.xml - example below.

<ItemList>
  <Item>
    <First>32</First>
    <Second>03</Second>
    <Third>403</Third>
    <Fourth>015</Fourth>
    <Fifth>0000</Fifth>
    <PIN>32034030150000</PIN>
  </Item>
</ItemList>

My Code:

import urllib2
import urllib

url = 'https://api.mozenda.com/rest?WebServiceKey=[CANNOT-PROVIDE]&Service=Mozenda10&Operation=Collection.AddItem&CollectionID=1037'

fileName = '/Users/me/Desktop/test.xml'

req = urllib2.Request(url, fileName)
moz_response = urllib2.urlopen(req)

response_data = moz_response.read()

print response_data

Output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<CollectionAddItemResponse xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <Result>Success</Result>
  <ItemID>1056</ItemID>
</CollectionAddItemResponse>

Output shows Success, but it's not inserting the data as expected. I suspect the xml needs to be encoded in some way, but I'm not sure...

The C# example is below from Mozenda's Site:

string webServiceKey = C70E1F84-E12B-4e73-B199-2EE6D43AF44E; //Your Account WebServiceKey.
string collectionID = 1001; //The ID of the destination Collection.
string url = string.Format(
"https://api.mozenda.com/rest?WebServiceKey={0}&Service=Mozenda10&Operation=Collection.AddItem&CollectionID={1}",
webServiceKey, collectionID);
string fileName = "C:\\Temp\\NewItems.xml"; //Path to the file containing the items to be uploaded.

WebClient client = new WebClient();
byte[] responseBinary = client.UploadFile(url, fileName);
string response = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(responseBinary);

Answer 1

You're not setting up your request correctly. When you do a POST request, you have to set up the body of the request in the way specified by RFC 1341, section 7.2.1

Here is an example in Python

from urllib2 import urlopen, Request
from string import ascii_uppercase, digits
from random import choice

# Open your data file
with open("C:\datafile.xml", "r") as data_file:
    data_file_string = data_file.read()

# The URL
url = 'https://api.mozenda.com/rest?WebServiceKey=[CANNOT-PROVIDE]&Service=Mozenda10&Operation=Collection.AddItem&CollectionID=1037'

# The boundary delimits where the file to be uploaded starts and where it ends.
boundary = "".join(choice(ascii_uppercase + digits) 
                   for x in range(20))
body_list = []
body_list.append("--" + boundary)
body_list.append("Content-Disposition: form-data;"
                 " name='file'; filename=''")
body_list.append("Content-Type: application/octet-stream")
body_list.append("")
body_list.append(data_file_string)
body_list.append("--{0}--".format(boundary))
body_list.append("")
body="\r\n".join(body_list).encode("utf8")

content_type = ("multipart/form-data; boundary="
                "{0}").format(boundary)
headers = {"Content-Type": content_type,
           "Content-Length": str(len(body))} # Tells how big the content is

request = Request(url, body, headers)

result = urlopen(url=request).read()