calling a function with cherry.py

Question

So im doing a bit of web development, and due to some restriction set by my employer i need to use cheetah and cherrypy. I have this form that upon submit runs a function, and from said function i call another via HTTPRedirect, and what i want is to call it without redirecting. here is an example

@cherrypy.expose
def onSubmit(**kwargs):
  ##Do something
  ##Do something
  ##Do something

  raise cherrypy.HTTPRedirect("/some_other_location/doSomethingElse?arg1=x&arg2=y")

now i want to do more stuff after running the second function, but i cant because since i redirect the code ends there. So my question is, is there a way to run that other function and not redirect, but still using HTTP. In javascript i would use AJAX and pass it the url, storing the output on the loader variable, but im not sure how to do this with cherrypy

Answer 1

Instead of doing the redirect, use one of the standard Python libraries for fetching HTTP data:

• http://docs.python.org/library/urllib.html
• http://docs.python.org/library/urllib2.html

or other arguably nicer third-party ones:

• http://docs.python-requests.org/
• http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/

Also, don't forget to convert the relative url to an absolute url, even if it's localhost:

To help you get started, here's an untested code snippet derived from your example, using urllib2:

import urllib2

@cherrypy.expose
def onSubmit(**kwargs):
  ##Do something
  ##Do something
  ##Do something

  url = "http://localhost/some_other_location/doSomethingElse?arg1=x&arg2=y"

  try:
    data = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
  except urllib2.HTTPError, e:
    raise cherrypy.HTTPError(500, "HTTP error: %d" % e.code)
  except urllib2.URLError, e:
    raise cherrypy.HTTPError(500, "Network error: %s" % e.reason.args[1])

  ##Do something with the data