General Parameters
Recognized parameters.
Name | Description | Required |
---|
version |
The version of the API which should be used. This
affects both parameter parsing, and the result. Version changes are
documented in a separate chapter.
If no version is specified, a warning message will be issued and
the services will default to version 1.
Accepted values: 1 …3 .
Type: Integer
| Yes |
out |
The services support data output in different formats.
By default, the answer is returned in JSON format, but it is also possible to
request the data in JSON-P, Javascript, XML, plain text or binary format. While XML and
JSON/Javascript formats are supported by all services, plain text and binary is only
supported by specific services. Please see the documentation for the individual
services for more details. Note that the plain text and binary output method may also
include a CSV representation.
To enable JSON-P or Javascript output, you also have to
specify the parameters callback or
varname .
For output in plain text and binary formats, please also specify
the template parameter to select the desired format.
Type: String
Accepted values: xml , js
(for JSON, JSON-P and Javascript), blob (for binary) or text .
Default value: js
| No |
prettyprint |
Set this parameter to 1 to receive the XML or
JSON/Javascript output with line breaks and indentations. If set to zero, or
unset, the output will be returned in compact form. This parameter is not
applicable to the plain text output format.
Type: Boolean
Accepted values: 0 or 1
Default value: 0
| No |
charset |
This parameter controls the desired charset of the
response. For XML and JSON output, characters which cannot be represented by
the desired charset, will be represented by the corresponding XML character
entity (e.g. ø ) or Unicode escape sequence (e.g.
\u00f8 ). For plain text output, those characters will be
approximated by one or more similarly looking characters, or substituted by a
question mark (? ).
Type: String
Accepted values: UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, ASCII
Default value: UTF-8
| No |
callback |
This parameter switches the output method to JSON-P
and allows to specify the method name that should receive the result. You can
choose this identifier freely to suit your needs.
Type: String
Example: parseResponse
Condition: only required for JSON-P output.
| Conditional |
varname |
This parameter switches the output method to
Javascript and allows to specify the variable name the output data should be
assigned to.
Type: String
Example: o
Condition: only required for Javascript output.
| Conditional |
template |
(Only for plain text output) Specify the template that
should be used for the plain text output format. The list of available templates
can be found in the individual service documentation.
Accepted values: dependent on the called service.
Type: String
Condition: only required for plain text output.
| Conditional |
General Response Elements.
Name | Description |
---|
version |
Every response will include this element. The value
will be set to 1 unless the API has to be changed in an
incompatible way (i.e. an element was removed, renamed or changed its type
– an addition may happen without increase in the version
number).
Type: Integer |
billing |
Every response will include this element. The value
will be set to how many credits the request cost. Usually this will be 1
but in certain cases, like with the astrodata service you
may be charged more per request depending on how much data you requested.
Type: Integer |
error (XML), errors (JSON) |
This element will only be included in the response if
errors occurred while processing your request. In this case, the response will
not contain further elements.
For the XML format, the element will be repeated as many times as
necessary, while for the JSON format, the messages are modeled as an array.
Type: String (XML), array of strings (JSON) |