Home > Developers > API Developer's Guide: Method Syntax

Description

SharedBook uses a REST-like method syntax. "REST is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web." See the Wikipedia entry on REST for more details...

Signature

The signature is required for all API calls that use an authentication token. Signatures are hash values calculated from the other parameters, using your secret word concatenated with the other arguments as described below:

• Sort and list your arguments in alphabetical order by parameter name
• e.g. "foo=1, bar=2, baz=3" should become "bar=2, baz=3, foo=1"
• Concatenate the secret word with the argument name-value pairs
• e.g. "SECRETWORDbar2baz3foo1"
• Calculate the md5 hash of this concatenated string
• Append this value as the final argument in your list, with the name "signature," as a hexidecimal string
• e.g. signature=2f3870be284f6c49b3a31a0c1728956f

Request Formats

Request formats look like the following URL (remove any spaces or line breaks, they're just included to make line breaks work on this page):

http://api.sharedbook.com/v0.6/bms/addPhoto?
apiKey=[API_KEY]&bmsId=[BMS_ID]&sessionToken=
[SESSION_TOKEN]&photo=[PHOTO_PATH]&caption=
[USER'S_CAPTION]&ownerName=[NAME]&time=[TIME]&photoId=
[PHOTO_ID]&signature=[SIGNATURE]

Response Formats

Successful response:

<bms.comment status="ok">
   <comment id=[COMMENT_ID] />
</bms.comment>

Failed response:

<[METHOD_NAME] status="fail">
<error code="[error-code]" msg="[error-message]" />
</[METHOD_NAME]>

Error Codes

General Error Codes