YQL Blog

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!