Category Archives: news

YQL environment files

Posted by yqlteam on February 20, 2009 – 11:32 am
Filed under feature, news

We’ve introduced a new env query parameter to both the YQL console and the web service. The env parameter expects a URL value that points to a plain text file anywhere on the web (including subversion repositories, github etc). The file should contain a list of use statements that specify all the open data tables that you’d like to be available to your YQL queries for that request. For example, if I want all of the New York Times open data tables hosted at javarants I would create a file like this:

use 'http://www.javarants.com/nyt/nyt.article.search.xml';
use 'http://www.javarants.com/nyt/nyt.bestsellers.history.xml';
use 'http://www.javarants.com/nyt/nyt.bestsellers.search.xml';
use 'http://www.javarants.com/nyt/nyt.bestsellers.xml';
use 'http://www.javarants.com/nyt/nyt.movies.critics.xml';
use 'http://www.javarants.com/nyt/nyt.movies.picks.xml';
use 'http://www.javarants.com/nyt/nyt.movies.reviews.xml';

…and serve it from somewhere on the web. If you want to try this new feature on some useful open data tables in the console, you can use a few of the ones currently in the github open data tables project like this:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?env=http://github.com/spullara/yql-tables/raw/ef685688d649a7514ebd27722366b2918d966573/alltables.env

Try it in the console!. If you look to the “table” list on the right of the console, you’ll see an extra 9 APIs and 30 tables to explore!

Open data tables added to YQL

Posted by yqlteam on February 5, 2009 – 12:53 pm
Filed under news

We’re pleased to announce that our last update now enables developers can create, use, and share table definitions over for any public API on the web, in addition to the Yahoo! APIs we support today.

For example, one of the requests we had when using our weather table was how to get an ID that would work for an international location. We pointed people to the weather.com API, but that needed a URL to be formatted up in a specific way. Now you can make that a table and use it:

use 'http://www.javarants.com/weather/weather.search.xml' as ws;
select * from weather.forecast where location in (select id from ws(1) where query='bonn, germany')

Try it.

While we believe this is a great start, it’s work in progress. We’re already adding more capabilities and adjusting the open data table XML syntax as we get feedback and go forward. You can read more about how to go about creating open data tables in our documentation.