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Making REST Requests

Topics

This section provides information on making REST requests with the Amazon SimpleDB web service.

About REST Requests

For Amazon SimpleDB requests, use HTTP GET requests that are URLs with query strings, or use HTTP POST requests with a body of query parameters. You can use either HTTPS or HTTP for your requests. If the length of the query string that you are constructing exceeds the maximum allowed length of an HTTP GET URL, use the HTTP POST method, instead.

The response is an XML document that conforms to a schema.

Structure of a GET Request

This guide presents the Amazon SimpleDB GET requests as URLs. The URL consists of:

Endpoint—The Amazon SimpleDB endpoints, see Regions and Endpoints.
Action—The action you want to perform. For example, creating a new domain (CreateDomain). For a complete list, see Operations.
Parameters—A set of parameters that might be specific to the operation, such as an ItemName, or common to all operations, such as your AWSAccessKeyId.
AWSAccessKeyId— The Access Key ID associated with your account. For more information, see Your AWS Security Credentials.
Version—The current API version for Amazon SimpleDB.
Signature—The signature authenticates your request to AWS and must be accompanied by a valid timestamp. For information about calculating the signature value and providing the correct timestamp, see HMAC-SHA Signature.
SignatureVersion—Currently for Amazon SimpleDB, this value should always be 2.
SignatureMethod—Either HmacSHA1 or HmacSHA256 depending upon which method was used to calculate the Signature value, see HMAC-SHA Signature.
Timestamp—A valid time stamp (instead of an expiration time) within 15 minutes before or after the request, see About the Time Stamp.

Structure of a POST Request

Amazon SimpleDB POST requests consists of:

HTTP Headers—The following headers are required:
```
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8
Host: sdb.amazonaws.com
```
The Host value is one of the Amazon SimpleDB endpoints, see Regions and Endpoints.
Action—The action you want to perform. For example, creating a new domain (CreateDomain). For a complete list, see Operations.
Parameters—A set of parameters that might be specific to the operation, such as an ItemName.
AWSAccessKeyId— The Access Key ID associated with your account. For more information, see Your AWS Security Credentials.
Version—The current API version for Amazon SimpleDB.
Signature—The signature authenticates your request to AWS, see HMAC-SHA Signature.
SignatureVersion—Currently for Amazon SimpleDB, this value should always be 2.
SignatureMethod—Either HmacSHA1 or HmacSHA256 depending upon which method was used to calculate the Signature value, see HMAC-SHA Signature.
Timestamp—A valid time stamp (instead of an expiration time) within 15 minutes before or after the request, see About the Time Stamp.

Using Parameters with REST

In a REST request, each parameter is separated with an ampersand (&). The following is an example of the DomainName parameter and ItemName parameter using the ampersand (&) separator. DomainName=MyDomain&ItemName=Item123

Parameters that have specific properties start with the main parameter name (such as Attribute), a dot, a sequence number, a dot, and the property name (such as Name). For example: &Attribute.1.Name=Color.

	Note
	Format the parameters as defined by the HTML 4.01 specification (section 17.13.4) for `application/x-www-form-urlencoded`. Parameter names become control names, and their values become control values. The order is not significant. However, also note that Amazon SimpleDB is more strict than the specification about what is URL encoded.

Sample REST Requests

This section provides sample REST requests and responses.

REST Request as a URL

The following shows a REST request that puts three attributes and values for an item named Item123 into the domain named MyDomain.

	Note
	A valid request does not contain line breaks. The following request contains line breaks to show each parameter clearly.

https://sdb.amazonaws.com/?Action=PutAttributes
&DomainName=MyDomain
&ItemName=Item123
&Attribute.1.Name=Color&Attribute.1.Value=Blue
&Attribute.2.Name=Size&Attribute.2.Value=Med
&Attribute.3.Name=Price&Attribute.3.Value=0014.99
&AWSAccessKeyId=your_access_key
&Version=2009-04-15
&Signature=valid_signature
&SignatureVersion=2
&SignatureMethod=HmacSHA256
&Timestamp=2010-01-25T15%3A01%3A28-07%3A00

REST Response

The following is the sample response:

<PutAttributesResponse>
  <ResponseMetadata>
    <StatusCode>Success</StatusCode>
    <RequestId>f6820318-9658-4a9d-89f8-b067c90904fc</RequestId>
    <BoxUsage>0.0000219907</BoxUsage>
  </ResponseMetadata>
</PutAttributesResponse>

REST Request using HTTP POST

The following shows a REST request that puts three attributes and values for an item named Item123 into the domain named MyDomain.

	Note
	A valid request does not contain line breaks in the body of the request. The following request contains line breaks to show each parameter clearly.

POST / HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8
Host: sdb.amazonaws.com

Action=PutAttributes
&DomainName=MyDomain
&ItemName=Item123
&Attribute.1.Name=Color&Attribute.1.Value=Blue
&Attribute.2.Name=Size&Attribute.2.Value=Med
&Attribute.3.Name=Price&Attribute.3.Value=0014.99
&AWSAccessKeyId=your_access_key
&Version=2009-04-15
&Signature=valid_signature
&SignatureVersion=2
&SignatureMethod=HmacSHA256
&Timestamp=2010-01-25T15%3A01%3A28-07%3A00

REST Response

The following is the sample response:

<PutAttributesResponse>
  <ResponseMetadata>
    <StatusCode>Success</StatusCode>
    <RequestId>f6820318-9658-4a9d-89f8-b067c90904fc</RequestId>
    <BoxUsage>0.0000219907</BoxUsage>
  </ResponseMetadata>
</PutAttributesResponse>

Document Conventions
Terms of Use

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