Connecting to a server:¶

        my $greeting = $epp->connect(%PARAMS);

This method establishes the TCP connection. You can use the %PARAMS hash to specify arguments that will be passed on to the constructors for "IO::Socket::INET" (such as a timeout) or "IO::Socket::SSL" (such as certificate information). See the relevant manpage for examples.

This method will "croak()" if connection fails, so be sure to use "eval()" if you want to catch the error.

By default, the return value for "connect()" will be the EPP <greeting> frame returned by the server. Please note that the same caveat about blocking applies to this method as to "get_frame()" (see below).

If you want to get the greeting yourself, set $params{no_greeting}.

Communicating with the server:¶

        my $answer = $epp->request($question);

This is a simple wrapper around "get_frame()" and "send_frame()" (see below). This method accepts a "question" frame as an argument, sends it to the server, and then returns the next frame the server sends back.

Getting a frame from the server:¶

        my $frame = $epp->get_frame;

This method returns an EPP response frame from the server. This may either be a scalar filled with XML, an "XML::LibXML::Document" object (or an "XML::DOM::Document" object), depending on whether you defined the "dom" parameter to the constructor.

Important Note: this method will block your program until it receives the full frame from the server. That could be a bad thing for your program, so you might want to consider using the "alarm()" function to apply a timeout, like so:

        my $timeout = 10; # ten seconds
        eval {
                local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" };
                alarm($timeout);
                my $frame = $epp->get_frame;
                alarm(0);
        };
        if ($@ ne '') {
                alarm(0);
                print "timed out\n";
        }

If the connection to the server closes before the response can be received, or the server returned a mal-formed frame, this method will "croak()".

Sending a frame to the server:¶

        $epp->send_frame($frame, $wfcheck);

This sends a request frame to the server. $frame may be one of:

• a scalar containing XML
• a scalar containing a filename
• an "XML::LibXML::Document" object (or an instance of a subclass)
• an "XML::DOM::Document" object (or an instance of a subclass)

Unless $wfcheck is false, the first two of these will be checked for well-formedness. If the XML data is broken, then this method will croak.

Disconnecting from the server:¶

        $epp->disconnect;

This closes the connection. An EPP server should always close a connection after a <logout> frame has been received and acknowledged; this method is provided to allow you to clean up on the client side, or close the connection out of sync with the server.