The Python client API is implemented as a single module. Its central class is xplra.XPlane. To communicate with the plugin in X-Plane, create an instance of it and call its connect function. This tries to establish the connection, and throws the standard I/O exceptions if it fails.

The class can be used to perform the various operations provided by the plugin. In case of a failure and exception is thrown. If the plugin signals an error, a ProtocolException is thrown with the error information provided by the plugin. In other cases some standard exception is thrown, which is mostly IOError if a communication error occurs.

The XPlane object can be reused in the sense, that after you have made a connection, you can disconnect and then connect again. This may be useful, if X-Plane crashes for some reason, and you can then reconnect if the user has restarted it.

Objects to store information about multi-dataref queries can be created by the createMultiGetter function. It returns an instance of xplra.MultiGetter, which can be used to store a number of datarefs and then execute a multi-dataref query for those datarefs. Before execution, the query can be registered in the plugin, so that the client does not have to send all the dataref information whenever the query is executed.

The XPlane object knows about any multi-dataref query objects. Therefore if you register such a multi-dataref query, and then the connection breaks, and then you reconnect, the query will-be re-registered too, i.e. you don't have to do it yourself.

Similarly, the createMultiSetter function can be used to create a multi-dataref update object. They are handled the same way by XPlane as the query objects when it comes to registration and re-registration.

The other functions of XPlane are mostly self-explanatory: they perform the operations defined by the protocol.