UPC Database: XML-RPC Web Service

XML-RPC Web Service

There is an XML-RPC web service located at the following URL:

http://www.upcdatabase.com/rpc

Try the function 'help' for starters. Direct questions to the upcdb-dev mailing list. The API is VERY likely to change in the short term, so be warned. Note: This is NOT for your web browser. Don't expect to get any useful results from directing your web browser at this URL...

More detail on how XML-RPC works is available at The XML-RPC Home Page.

Here's a quick and dirty example of how to call this service in perl. Non-perl programmers would benefit from the debug output this generates.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use Frontier::Client;
use Data::Dumper;

use strict;

my $coder = Frontier::RPC2->new;

my $server = Frontier::Client->new( 'url' => 'http://dev.upcdatabase.com/rpc', debug => 1, );

my $method = shift;

my $result = $server->call($method, map { $coder->string($_) } @ARGV);

print Dumper($result);

__END__

Here's a chunk of Java code that calls the XML-RPC service:

import redstone.xmlrpc.XmlRpcClient;
import redstone.xmlrpc.XmlRpcStruct;

public static String getUPCText(String upc)
{
	String text = "";
	try
	{
		XmlRpcClient client  = new XmlRpcClient( "http://www.upcdatabase.com/rpc", false);
		XmlRpcStruct result  = (XmlRpcStruct)client.invoke( "lookupUPC", new Object[] { upc } );
		HashMap      results = (HashMap)result;

		if (
			results.size()>0 &&
			results.get("message").toString().equalsIgnoreCase("Database entry found"))
		{
			text = results.get("description").toString()+" "+results.get("size").toString();
		}
	}
	catch (Exception e)
	{
	}
	return text;
}

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XML-RPC Web Service