Requests and Responses

Requests

Most services respond to the HTTPS method GET while certain others respond to both GET and POST. The applicable methods per service are described under each service group.

Responses

The response serialization for each service is dictated by the HTTPS header Accept. The following table lists the possible return formats. Each format is described in the response section of the respective service method. Not all formats are applicable to all requests.

Accept

Serialization

application/json

JSON

text/xml

XML

text/html

XHTML currently unused but may be supported in the future


CDWS determines the serialization method of the output in the following order:

  1. HTTPS header: Accept
  2. Query parameter: content-type
  3. Pre-defined default per service (JSON with the exception of /text which defaults to XML)

Typically, clients have their own method of setting request HTTPS headers.


The following examples use the UNIX wget command line utility.

Example 1: setting the request header field

wget -O- \
  --header 'x-user: x' \
  --header 'x-password: y' \
  --header="Accept:text/xml"
'https://cdws21.ificlaims.com/search/query?q=pn:ep-0700000-b1'


Example 2: setting the content-type as a query-string parameter

wget -O- \
  --header 'x-user: x' \
  --header 'x-password: y' \
'https://cdws21.ificlaims.com/search/query?q=solr&content-type=text/xml'

Note: All CDWS responses can be returned as either JSON or XML. The only exception is the attachment service method /attachment/fetch which returns the image bytes with corresponding response headers last-modified, content-type, and content-length appropriately populated.

Although the serialization is predetermined by the request content-type, the response format for each service group differs. The response formats are described under their respective service groups: