RPC Functionality

The RPCMixin allows your SPADE agent to perform and respond to remote procedure calls using the XEP-0009 standard.

Note

The mixin automatically registers the xep_0009 plugin upon initialization.

Using Remote Calls (call)

To invoke a method on a remote agent, use the call method. This method sends an IQ stanza containing the method name and parameters, and returns the result once received.

# Example: Calling a remote method
result = await agent.rpc.call(
    jid="target@example.com",
    method_name="get_status",
    params=["arg1", "arg2"],
    timeout=10
)

  • jid: The Jabber ID of the target agent.

  • method_name: The name of the RPC method to invoke.

  • params: A list of arguments to pass to the method.

  • timeout: Time in seconds to wait for a response (default is 10).

Registering Methods (register_method)

To allow other agents to call functions on your agent, you must expose them using register_method. This maps a local function to a string identifier that remote agents can call.

# Define your handler
def my_handler(arg1, arg2):
    return f"Processed {arg1} and {arg2}"

# Register the handler
agent.rpc.register_method(handler=my_handler, method_name="process_data")

The wrapper handles the underlying conversion of XML to Python types automatically, allowing your handler to receive standard Python objects.