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Thank you. Your server produces a response containing nonstandard type tag "ex:nil" [1].
 <member><name>authority</name><value>ROLE_USER</value></member>
 <member><name>fromDate</name><value><ex:nil/></value></member>
 <member><name>userId</name><value><i4>15</i4></value></member>
xmlrpclib is unable to handle this tag, and error handling is poor. xmlrpclib can handle only standard types and "nil" [2].
What is worse, xmlrpclib silently ignores unsupported tag and interprets following name "userId" as a value of the name "fromDate", and following userId's value 15 as next name and so forth. Your workaround doesn't help since the result is totally broken. You get values as keys and keys as values.
What can we do with this issue?
1. Add better handling of unsupported tags. There is a bug, xmlrpc should detect this case and fail instead of producing unreliable result. This is applicable to 2.7.
2. Add support of some Apache extension tags. This is new feature and can be added in 3.6 only. Not all extension tags can be supported, "ex:serializable" is Java specific. This is separate issue.
Martin, do you agree?
[1] http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/types.html
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20130120074804/http://ontosys.com/xml-rpc/extensions.php