Last week we announced the release of four API's and the site fcc.gov/developer at the Gov 2.0 conference. We heard great feedback via twitter, direct email and blog comments. We have taken some of these ideas and implemented the changes right away. We want to make sure that these services are useful to the developer community and that you know we are listening to your concerns here. The changes we have made are listed below, but please keep the comments coming. Your help is required to make these services better.
Thanks.
1. Bug fixes
- We heard about a bug in the FRN API that would cause a timeout when querying certain FRNs. Sorry about that, it should be fixed now.
- We head about a bug in the Speed Test API that would cause wrong Wireline Maximum Download and Maximum Upload values in some cases. Again, sorry about that, it should be fixed now.
2. API changes (Block Search)
You gave us a suggestion that would make the return more compact and usable as we grow the service, so we decided to change the xml and JSON returns. Now the Block Search API returns data in the following structure to facilitate parsing and future expansion. This
will break client applications of this method call if you implemented calls already to this API.
New Structure:
XML
<Response executionTime="0.047" status="OK">
<Block FIPS="560239782002133"/>
<County name="Lincoln" FIPS="56023"/>
<State name="Wyoming" code="WY" FIPS="56"/>
</Response>
JSON
{"@executionTime":"0.047","@status":"OK","Block":{"@FIPS":"560239782002133"},
"County":{"@name":"Lincoln","@FIPS":"56023"},
"State":{"@name":"Wyoming","@code":"WY","@FIPS":"56"}}
JSONP
jsonp({"@executionTime":"0.047","@status":"OK","Block":
{"@FIPS":"560239782002133"},"County":{"@name":"Lincoln","@FIPS":"56023"},
"State":{"@name":"Wyoming","@code":"WY","@FIPS":"56"}})
3. API Enhancements (Census and Speed Test)
We added the ability to select desired MIME return type from the URL using the parameter format, i.e. format=json. Possible values are xml, json and jsonp (in this last case, the parameter callback should also be used). If no format is specified XML is returned. This change doesn't break the API (old calls would still work, returning XML).