Structure & Standards

We tried to develop the API to be as consistent as possible. As such, we've implemented a few standards requests and responses must adhere to. The sections listed below can be used as a general guideline when interacting with the Snaggr API service.

Url Structure

Access to the API is done by pointing all requests to a standardized URL. The URL itself varies from service to service, but is structured according to the following standard:

http://rest.snag.gr/{GROUP}/{SERVICE_TYPE}.{SERVICE_NAME}.{SERVICE_FORMAT}

• {SERVICE_GROUP} represents the category of services you are attempting to access. At the moment, the only supported group is images, but there are plans to eventually add videos to the search service.
• {SERVICE_TYPE} is the kind of action you wish to perform with a service. There are currently 3 classes of actions: get, post and delete
• {SERVICE_NAME} is the actual name of the service, such as providers or cache.
• {SERVICE_FORMAT} determines the format in which you want the service response to be presented. There are currently 3 supported formats: json, php and xml

Following this URL schema, a normal API call may point to something like the following example:

http://rest.snag.gr/images/post.search.xml

Service Structure

As outlined in the previous section, an actual call to a service includes specifying the type, name and format. Naturally, all services will have some kind of distinct name, but not all services support every combination of type and format. These details can be found by browsing the actual service list documenation.

Some examples of a service's structure are:

• delete.cache.json
• get.cache.xml
• get.tags.php

Required Parameters

The set of required parameters varies from service to service, but at the very least, it is expected to provide us with your API key.

Date Formats

All dates and times returned by the API conform to the following standard:

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS

Some examples include:

• 2009-11-25 13:10:57
• 2009-12-10 01:43:58
• 2009-12-10 01:36:36

Service Types

We currently support three types of service calls:

1. get
   
2. post
   
3. delete

Service Response Formats

We currently support three types of service response formats:

1. json
   
2. php
   
3. xml

You can view sample responses by reading the API Response Samples page.

HTTP Request Types

All interaction with this API is done with either HTTP POST or GET requests.