Python Post to Bills using Pycurl

1

Hello again,

After working my way around Curl to successfully POST a Bill I have now
moved a step further to automate the process and have started using Python
with Pycurl to authenticate through OAuth and then POST the desired fields
to Freeagent.

The script I have put together so far can successfully GET data from the
API but I am struggling to POST. The script is below (populated with dummy
data) and please forgive and obviously/newbie mistakes, im new to Python!

import time
import pycurl
import urllib
import urllib.request
import urllib.parse
import json
import oauthlib as oauth
import io
from io import BytesIO
buf = io.BytesIO()
billdata = (’{“Bill”:{“due-on”: “2013-08-20”,“contact”: “https:
//api.sandbox.freeagent.com/v2/contacts/1835/","reference”:
“Python”,“total_value”: “150000.0”,“category”: “https:
//api.sandbox.freeagent.com/v2/categories/285/","dated-on”:
“2013-07-20”,“sales-tax-rate”: “20.0”}}’)
data = json.dumps(billdata)
def getUserData():

  •    c = pycurl.Curl()*

  •    c.setopt(pycurl.URL, "https://api.sandbox.freeagent.com/v2/bills")*

  •    c.setopt(pycurl.HTTPHEADER, [*

  •        'Authorization: Bearer %s' % str('xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'),*

  •        'Accept: application/json',*

  •        'Content-Type : application/json'*

  •        ])*

  •    c.setopt(pycurl.POST, 1)*

  •    c.setopt(pycurl.POSTFIELDS,data)*

  •    c.setopt(pycurl.WRITEFUNCTION, buf.write)*

  •    c.perform()*

getUserData()
print (buf.getvalue())
buf.close

This is what is printed after executing the script:

b"

500 Internal Server Error

If you are the
administrator of this website, then please read this web application’s log
file and/or the web server’s log file to find out what went
wrong."

If anyone can help and point out where im going wrong that would be greatly
appreciated.

Regards,
Karl

2

Hi,

Thanks very much for the pointers. I’ll give it a try on Monday and let you know how it goes.

Thanks again for the help.

Karl

3

Hi Karl,

I can see a couple of errors with your script which is causing the API to
reject it. The first one is in your Content-Type header declaration,
there’s an extra space before the colon, which is leading the server to
ignore the header. The correct header string should be “Content-Type:
application/json”.

The second issue is you’re storing a string representation of the JSON data
you wish to send in the ‘billdata’ variable, then you’re also escaping it
with the json library and storing that into the ‘data’ variable. I would
suggest either using a python dictionary for ‘billdata’ and leaving the
json escaping in place, or just commenting out the 'data = …` line and
leaving ‘billdata’ containing a string representation of the JSON. (And
update your pycurl.POSTFIELDS line to use billdata directly if you comment
out the ‘data =’ line of course!)

And lastly I just noticed in the JSON, you’ve specified the top level key
as “Bill”. The API is case-sensitive with data, so you’ll need to change
that to “bill” before it’ll work.

Hope that helps! :slight_smile:
Caius