Enhancements for OCLC Web services set for 20 May 2012

The planned install this weekend has a number of enhancements designed to make your life better, as a developer. Of course, I say this with a caveat because it still feels like step 2 of 132 that we have envisioned for having all the services look, act and smell the way we want them to. But, “walk before you run” is what we keep telling ourselves.

What you need to know:

Principle to Principal

Small but important change for all WorldShare (WMS) APIs except NCIP:

• Parameter name PrincipleID will now become PrincipalID
• Parameter PrincipleIDNS will now become PrincipalIDNS

[Here’s a quick and dirty grammar guide, to help us all remember the difference between principle and principal.]

Warning: Your code will break, if you do not change this.

Support for WSKey3
We love WSKeys around here at OCLC Developer Network. But what does WSKey3 support mean for you? With WSKey3, you can call a service directly, rather than using a server-side proxy page. More documentation for using WSKey 3 will be available soon.

Specific service enhancements detailed below:

Acquisitions API
New functionality includes the ability to:

• Receive Copies
• Display copy information within Acquisitions
• Added support for WSKey3

Updates include:

• Changes to the Schema. New field added for who an Order Item was requested by (if known)
• Parameter name PrincipleID becomes PrincipalID
• Parameter changes from PrincipleIDNS to PrincipalIDNS

Circulation API
New functionality includes:

• Added support for WSKey3

Updates include:

• Parameter name PrincipleID becomes PrincipalID
• Parameter changes from PrincipleIDNS to PrincipalIDNS

Collection Management API
Updates include:

• Parameter name PrincipleID becomes PrincipalID
• Parameter changes from PrincipleIDNS to PrincipalIDNS

Vendor Information Center Web Service API
New functionality includes the ability to:

• Perform write operations on local vendor data
• Create and edit local vendor records
• Added support for WSKey3

Updates include:

• Parameter name PrincipleID becomes PrincipalID
• Parameter changes from PrincipleIDNS to PrincipalIDNS

WorldCat knowledge base API

New functionality includes the ability to:

• See Provider Name, Uid in the response for collections and entries
  With this update, now you can display provider information along with results in an A-Z list, if you use the REST request type.
• See Non-latin and 0-9 queries in A-Z lists
  Now queries made to create A-Z lists using search-type=atoz return summaries of the titles available in nonlatin character ranges and the numeric 0-9 range. The title field now supports two special characters to indicate these ranges:

• Multiple request/response for OpenURLs
  A JSON-only version of multiple OpenURLs in one request/response is now available. Using the new openurl/mresolve address, a JSON-formatted set of queries can now be sent with a single request.
  A single response will be returned containing the results for all of the different queries. Using this version of the API allows a client to cut down on the HTTP traffic between their system and the WorldCat knowledge base API when issuing many queries at once. These requests can take a callback parameter to support JSONP output.

We’ll have example code available following the install in the documentation area for this service.

Updates include:

• Query parameter “order-by” is now “orderBy”
• “max-results” is now “itemsPerPage”
• “start-index” is now “startIndex”
  
  As new services are being built for exposure through the WorldShare Platform, adjustments to OCLC’s Data Protocols are being made. The changes above reflect these recent adjustments.
  
  Both the old and the new versions of these parameters are still supported in the query to the KB API. However, the response format has been changed to exclusively return the new field names in the os:Query field. If the os:Query field is parsed by any client, this change may break that application. All clients should switch to the new style query parameters at the next possible opportunity.

The planned enhancements for all the services listed above is Sunday, May 20 from 2 am-8 am EDT.

We’ll send another message as soon as we’ve verified that all the enhancements are working as expected, and that documentation/supporting information has also been updated.

There are more enhancements and more services coming soon. We’re in the midst of working on enhancements/bug fixes for WorldCat Identities, WorldCat Search API, VIAF, FAST and especially thinking about additional implementations of Linked Data with our Research and Innovation colleagues.

Stay tuned. It’s going to be a busy summer.