Using XML-RPC in Python 3, how to see if a WordPress post exists by date and category?

Question

I need to query a WordPress site from Python 3 to see if a WordPress post of custom post type with a specific date and category already exists. Based on the docs for the the wp.GetPosts method, this seems to be possible, but I cannot work out the right query. What I'm using currently is:

import xmlrpc.client
wp_url = "http://www.mywebsite.com/xmlrpc.php"
server = xmlrpc.client.ServerProxy(wp_url)

filters = {
            'post_date': start_time, # an RFC-3339 formatted date
            'post_type' : 'my-custom-post-type', 
        }

fields = {
        'terms' : { 
            'category': ['my-category'] 
            }
        }

post_id = server.wp.getPosts(wp_blogid, wp_username, wp_password, filters, fields)

(where wp_blogid, wp_username and wp_password are all correctly defined, of course).

What this returns is just a list of ten seemingly-random posts of the correct custom post type, with no further filter applied. Do I need to just get every post and then iterate over them for my terms, or is there an easier way?

Answer 1

There is no option to filter posts by date, sorry. The documentation is misleading, in that it claims to support the same filters as #wp.getPost , but the latter has no filtering at all ; presumably that section confused fields with filters .

The documentation lists what is supported in the argument lists:

• struct filter : Optional.
  • string post_type
  • string post_status
  • int number
  • int offset
  • string orderby
  • string order

The Wordpress XML-RPC source code handling the filters corroborates this.

So using XML-RPC, you have no other option but to page through the results to find the matching posts for the given date.

You should look at the REST API instead, the /wp-json/wp/v2/posts route lets you filter posts by date.