Request Objects

Request objects represent remote resource, in the form of a URL, and local storage in form of either a path or an open file-like object.

The DownloadRequest class has these parameters:

• url (required) the URL of the file to be downloaded as a string
• destination (required) either a local filesystem path as a string or an open file-like object
• data (optional) arbitrary data that will be passed back as part of a corresponding report object
• headers (optional) a dictionary of additional headers

Constructor Signature:

def __init__(self, url, destination, data=None, headers=None):

URL

The URL parameter url must be of a scheme (read: protocol) supported by the downloader instance that it will be passed to.

Destination

The destination parameter is either an absolute filesystem path as a string or an open file-like object. If the destination is an open file-like object, the downloader will not close it upon completion of the download; even if an error occurs.

Example:

destination = '/tmp/myfile'

destination = open('/tmp/myfile', wb)

Data

The parameter is passed, unadulterated, to the report object that corresponds to the request object. This is convenience mechanism to allow developers to pass arbitrary data to an event listener.

Headers

The headers parameter is an option dictionary that can contain any custom headers for a particular request.