Query Requests

This guide presents the Amazon SQS GET requests as URLs, which can be used directly in a browser. The URL consists of:

The following is an example GET request to send a message to an SQS queue.

http://queue.amazonaws.com/queue1?Action=SendMessage&MessageBody=Your%20Message%20Text​&AWSAccessKeyId=0GS7553JW74RRM612K02EXAMPLE&Version=2008-01-01​&Expires=2008-02-10T12:00:00Z​&Signature=lBP67vCvGlDMBQ1do​fZxg8E8SUEXAMPLE&SignatureVersion=2&SignatureMethod=HmacSHA256

	Important
	Because the GET requests are URLs, you must URL encode the parameter values. For example, in the preceding example request, the value for the MessageBody parameter is actually Your Message Text. However, spaces are not allowed in URLs, so each space is URL encoded as "%20". The rest of the example has not been URL encoded to make it easier for you to read.

To make the GET examples even easier to read, this guide presents them in the following parsed format.

http://queue.amazonaws.com/queue1
?Action=SendMessage
&MessageBody=Your%20Message%20Text
&AWSAccessKeyId=0GS7553JW74RRM612K02EXAMPLE
&Version=2008-01-01
&Expires=2008-02-10T12:00:00Z
&Signature=lBP67vCvGlDMBQ1dofZxg8E8SUEXAMPLE
&SignatureVersion=2
&SignatureMethod=HmacSHA256

Note

In the example Query requests we present in this guide, we use a false AWS Access Key ID and false signature, each with EXAMPLE appended. We do this to indicate that you shouldn't expect the signature in the example to be accurate based on the request parameters presented in the example. The one exception to this is in the instructions for creating Query request signatures. The example there shows a real signature based on a particular AWS Access Key ID we specify and the request parameters in the example (for more information, see Query Request Authentication).

In SQS, all parameters except MessageBody always have values that have no spaces. The value you provide for MessageBody in SendMessage requests can have spaces. In this guide, any example SendMessage Query requests with a MessageBody that includes spaces is displayed with the spaces URL encoded (as %20). For clarity, the rest of the URL is not displayed in a URL encoded format.

The first line represents the endpoint of the request. This is the resource the request acts on. The preceding example acts on a queue, so the request's endpoint is the queue's identifier, known as the queue URL. For more details about the queue URL, see Queue URLs.

After the endpoint is a question mark (?), which separates the endpoint from the parameters. Each parameter is separated by an ampersand (&).

The Action parameter indicates the action to perform (for a list of the actions, see API Reference). For a list of the other parameters that are common to all Query requests, see Request Parameters Common to All Actions.

SQS also accepts POST requests. With a POST request, you send the query parameters as a form in the HTTP request body as described in the following procedure.

The following example shows the final POST request.

POST /queue1 HTTP/1.1
Host: queue.amazonaws.com
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Action=SendMessage
&MessageBody=Your+Message+Text
&AWSAccessKeyId=0GS7553JW74RRM612K02EXAMPLE
&Version=2008-01-01
&Expires=2008-02-10T12%3A00%3A00Z
&SignatureVersion=2
&SignatureMethod=HmacSHA256
&Signature=lBP67vCvGlDMBQ1dofZxg8E8SUEXAMPLE

SQS requires no other HTTP headers in the request besides Content-Type. The authentication signature you provide is the same signature you would provide if you sent a GET request (for information about the signature, see Query Request Authentication).

	Note
	Your HTTP client typically adds other items to the HTTP request as required by the version of HTTP the client uses. We don't include those additional items in the examples in this guide.