v1 API Introduction

Introduction

Version 1.0 of the Oodle API is an XML-RPC web service.

XML-RPC is a method for making web service calls in which you:

Define a method name and a set of method parameters
Encode everything into an XML document that matches the XML-RPC spec
Send that XML document in the body of an HTTP "POST" request to an XML-RPC endpoint

In our case, the Oodle XML-RPC endpoint is:

http://api.oodle.com/api/

It's Just an HTTP Web Service - So Use Any Language or Platform You Want

Since the Oodle API is just a web service, you can use any platform or language you'd like to create your application. All major application development platforms support the basic ability to make HTTP calls and that's the only technical requirement to do Oodle API development.

In all cases, however, your application source code should:

Create an XML-RPC client
Set a method name of "get"
Set up a hash of method parameters for the "get" method (e.g. your API key, search keywords, zip code, etc.)
Encode everything into an XML-RPC request
Send that request to http://api.oodle.com/api in an HTTP POST request
Do something with the response it gets back

If things are still unclear, see the XML-RPC spec, which has an example XML-RPC request and response.

Use an XML-RPC Client Library To Make Things Easy

We highly recommend that you use an XML-RPC client library in your implementation. This will make your implementation much, much easier. These libraries handle details such as properly encoding the parameters into XML-RPC format, constructing the body of the HTTP request, etc. Open source XML-RPC client libraries are widely available for all major languages, including C/C++, Java, PHP, Perl, and Python. See our FAQ for more information on finding an XML-RPC client library for your platform.

4000 Results Maximum

Very important: Our API will only return the first 4000 results from any given search. If you need more, you'll have to break your query up into several sub-queries, each of which return less than 4000 results.

Documentation Format

To make this document easier to read, examples will use the following conventions instead of the XML-RPC syntax.

XML-RPC strings will be shows in single quotes.
XML-RPC 'structs' will be enclosed in curly bracket characters. The following example shows a 'struct' with the key fruit equal to apple, and color equal to green.
```
{
   fruit => 'apple',
   color => 'green'
}
```
XML-RPC arrays will be enclosed in square bracket characters. The following example shows an array with three apple types:
```
[ 'Red Delicious', 'Granny Smith', 'Pink Lady' ]
```
Comments will be prefixed with #

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