Making HTTP Requests to Amazon SWF - Amazon Simple Workflow Service
HTTP Header ContentsHTTP Body ContentSample JSON Request and Response

Making HTTP Requests to Amazon SWF

If you don't use one of the AWS SDKs, you can perform Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF) operations over HTTP using the POST request method. The POST method requires that you specify the operation in the header of the request and provide the data for the operation in JSON format in the body of the request.

HTTP Header Contents

Amazon SWF requires the following information in the header of an HTTP request:

  • host The Amazon SWF endpoint.

  • x-amz-date You must provide the time stamp in either the HTTP Date header or the AWS x-amz-date header (some HTTP client libraries don't let you set the Date header). When an x-amz-date header is present, the system ignores any Date header when authenticating the request.

    The date must be specified in one of the following three formats, as specified in the HTTP/1.1 RFC:

    • Sun, 06 Nov 1994 08:49:37 GMT (RFC 822, updated by RFC 1123)

    • Sunday, 06-Nov-94 08:49:37 GMT (RFC 850, obsoleted by RFC 1036)

    • Sun Nov 6 08:49:37 1994 (ANSI C's asctime() format)

  • x-amzn-authorization The signed request parameters in the format:

    AWS3 AWSAccessKeyId=####,Algorithm=HmacSHA256, [,SignedHeaders=Header1;Header2;...]
Signature=S(StringToSign)

    AWS3 – This is an AWS implementation-specific tag that denotes the authentication version used to sign the request (currently, for Amazon SWF this value is always AWS3).

    AWSAccessKeyId – Your AWS Access Key ID.

    Algorithm – The algorithm used to create the HMAC-SHA value of the string-to-sign, such as HmacSHA256 or HmacSHA1.

    Signature – Base64( Algorithm( StringToSign, SigningKey ) ). For details see Calculating the HMAC-SHA Signature for Amazon SWF

    SignedHeaders – (Optional) If present, must contain a list of all the HTTP Headers used in the Canonicalized HttpHeaders calculation. A single semicolon character (;) (ASCII character 59) must be used as the delimiter for list values.

  • x-amz-target – The destination service of the request and the operation for the data, in the format

    com.amazonaws.swf.service.model.SimpleWorkflowService. + <action>

    For example, com.amazonaws.swf.service.model.SimpleWorkflowService.RegisterDomain

  • content-type – The type needs to specify JSON and the character set, as application/json; charset=UTF-8

The following is an example header for an HTTP request to create a domain. 

POST http://swf.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ HTTP/1.1
Host: swf.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.25) Gecko/20111212 Firefox/3.6.25 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0E)
Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
X-Amz-Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:42:12 GMT
X-Amz-Target: com.amazonaws.swf.service.model.SimpleWorkflowService.RegisterDomain
Content-Encoding: amz-1.0
X-Amzn-Authorization: AWS3 AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE,Algorithm=HmacSHA256,SignedHeaders=Host;X-Amz-Date;X-Amz-Target;Content-Encoding,Signature=tzjkF55lxAxPhzp/BRGFYQRQRq6CqrM254dTDE/EncI=
Referer: http://swf.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/explorer/index.html
Content-Length: 91
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache

{"name": "867530902",
 "description": "music",
 "workflowExecutionRetentionPeriodInDays": "60"}

Here is an example of the corresponding HTTP response. 

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: application/json
x-amzn-RequestId: 4ec4ac3f-3e16-11e1-9b11-7182192d0b57

HTTP Body Content

The body of an HTTP request contains the data for the operation specified in the header of the HTTP request. Use the JSON data format to convey data values and data structure, simultaneously. Elements can be nested within other elements using bracket notation. For example, the following shows a request to list all workflow executions that started between two specified points in time—using Unix Time notation. 

{
 "domain": "867530901",
 "startTimeFilter":
 {
   "oldestDate": 1325376070,
	 "latestDate": 1356998399
 },
 "tagFilter":
 {
   "tag": "music purchase"
 }
}

Sample Amazon SWF JSON Request and Response

The following example shows a request to Amazon SWF for a description of the domain that we created previously. Then it shows the Amazon SWF response.

HTTP POST Request

POST http://swf.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ HTTP/1.1
Host: swf.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.25) Gecko/20111212 Firefox/3.6.25 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0E)
Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
X-Amz-Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 03:13:33 GMT
X-Amz-Target: com.amazonaws.swf.service.model.SimpleWorkflowService.DescribeDomain
Content-Encoding: amz-1.0
X-Amzn-Authorization: AWS3 AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE,Algorithm=HmacSHA256,SignedHeaders=Host;X-Amz-Date;X-Amz-Target;Content-Encoding,Signature=IFJtq3M366CHqMlTpyqYqd9z0ChCoKDC5SCJBsLifu4=
Referer: http://swf.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/explorer/index.html
Content-Length: 21
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache

{"name": "867530901"}

Amazon SWF Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 137
Content-Type: application/json
x-amzn-RequestId: e86a6779-3f26-11e1-9a27-0760db01a4a8

{"configuration":
  {"workflowExecutionRetentionPeriodInDays": "60"},
 "domainInfo":
  {"description": "music",
   "name": "867530901",
   "status": "REGISTERED"}
}

Notice the protocol (HTTP/1.1) is followed by a status code (200). A code value of 200 indicates a successful operation.

Amazon SWF doesn't serialize null values. If your JSON parser is set to serialize null values for requests, Amazon SWF ignores them.