loadHITs - Amazon Mechanical Turk
DescriptionArgumentsExampleOutputRelated Commands

This software is not currently supported by Amazon Mechanical Turk

The Amazon Mechanical Turk Command Line Tools (CLT) are not currently maintained by Amazon Mechanical Turk. If you would still like to use Amazon Mechanical Turk from the command line, use the mturk command in the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). For more information, see the mturk section of the AWS CLI Command Reference .

 

loadHITs

Description

The loadHITs command loads HITs into Amazon Mechanical Turk. Before you can use this command, you must create an input file, a question file, and a properties file. If you are loading a single HIT, your question file can contain the question information. The question file is an XML file that conforms to the QuestionForm Data Structure. If you are loading multiple HITs, you should create a question template file. This file has the same XML format as the question file, but it contains placeholders for the fields defined in the input file. For each row in the input file, the system inserts the the fields into the placeholders of the template file. The number of rows in the input file determines how many HITs are created. For more information about these files, see Files Used by the Command Line Tools.

If the HITs load successfully, this operation creates a .success file with the same name as your .input file. That is, if your input file is called MyHITs.input, then the .success file will be MyHITs.success. If the HITs do not load successfully, this operation creates a .failure file with the same name as your .input file. If you want to call this command multiple times with the same input file, you can use the label argument to change the name of the created file. For more information about the .success file and the .failure file see Files Used by the Command Line Tools.

Arguments

The following table describes the arguments for the loadHITs command.

Name Description Required

-help or -h

Displays the help for this operation

Example: -help

No

-input [file name]

Specifies the input file. For information about this file, see The input file in Files Used by the Command Line Tools.

Example: -input helloworld.input

Yes

-label [filename]

Specifies the name to use for the .success and the .failure files.

Example: -label survey_2

No

-maxhits

Specifies the maximum number of HITs to create. Use this for testing if you do not want to load the entire input file.

Example: -maxhits 1

No

-preview

Creates an HTML preview of the HIT instead of loading it into Amazon Mechanical Turk. The name of the file is specified by the argument. If the -previewfile argument is not specified, this operation creates a file named preview.html in the current directory.

Example: -preview

No

-previewfile [file name]

Specifies the name of the html preview file. This argument is used only if the preview argument is specified.

Example: -previewfile helloworld.html

No

-properties [file name]

Specifies the HIT properties file. For information about this file, see The HIT properties file in Files Used by the Command Line Tools.

Example: -properties helloworld.properties

Yes

-question [file name]

Specifies the question file. For information about this file, see The question file in Files Used by the Command Line Tools.

Example: -question helloworld.question

Yes

-sandbox

Runs this command in the Amazon Mechanical Turk sandbox for testing. This argument takes precedence even if you specify the production web site in your mturk.properties file.

Example:-sandbox

No

Example

The following examples for Unix and Windows show how to use the loadHITs command. This example loads five HITs using the information found in the survey.input, survey.question, and survey.properties files found in the directory ..\survey.

Unix

The following example demonstrates how to call this command from Unix. 


./loadHITs.sh -input ..\survey\survey.input -question ..\survey\survey.question -properties ..\survey\survey.properties

Windows

The following example demonstrates how to call this command from Microsoft Windows. 


loadHITs -input ..\survey\survey.input -question ..\survey\survey.question -properties ..\survey\survey.properties

Output

These examples create a .success file with the same path and name as the file specified by the-input argument. In these examples, the returned file is survey.sucess in the ..\survey directory. The command produces the following output.


--[Initializing]----------
 Input: ..\survey\survey.input
 Properties: ..\survey\survey.properties
 Question File: ..\survey\survey.question
 Preview mode disabled
--[Loading HITs]----------
  Start time: Fri Dec 14 16:23:28 PST 2007
Created HIT 1: HITId=GX9P62Y4EXAZSZYRQ8EZ
Created HIT 2: HITId=2WAZRKZHC27ZV25HYXD0
Created HIT 3: HITId=R8TZ2QYQKXMZ6X1NYKN0
Created HIT 4: HITId=TA6CVRDAQBWPTNN013W0
Created HIT 5: HITId=R0AZ1KZSVWFZS75QZRF0

You may see your HIT(s) with HITTypeId 'YTXZ13ZWEYFZRBZ4V120' here:

  http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=YTXZ13ZWEYFZRBZ4V120

  End time: Fri Dec 14 16:23:32 PST 2007
--[Done Loading HITs]----------
  Total load time: 4 seconds.
  Successfully loaded 5 HITs.

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