Common Parameters - Amazon SimpleDB
Request ParametersRequest Parameter Formats

Common Parameters

This section describes parameters used by Amazon SimpleDB operations.

Some parameters are required by all operations and are not repeated in the documentation unless the usage is unique for that operation. Other parameters are conditional which indicates they are required for some operations and optional for others.

Request Parameters

Name Description Type
Action Name of the action. Required

Attribute.X.Name (REST)

 Name of attribute associated with an item. Required by PutAttributes and BatchPutAttributes. Optional for DeleteAttributes and BatchDeleteAttributes. Conditional

Attribute.X.Value (REST)

 Value of attribute associated with an item. Required by PutAttributes and BatchPutAttributes. Optional for DeleteAttributes and BatchDeleteAttributes. Conditional

Attribute.X.Replace (REST)

 Flag to specify whether to replace the attribute/value or to add a new attribute/value. Used by PutAttributes and BatchPutAttributes. The default setting is false. Optional
AttributeName Name of attribute to return. Optional for GetAttributes. Conditional
AWSAccessKeyId For more information, see Request Authentication. Required
DomainName Name of the domain used in the operation. Required
ItemName Unique identifier of an item. Required by PutAttributes, BatchPutAttributes, GetAttributes, DeleteAttributes, and BatchDeleteAttributes. Conditional
MaxNumberOfDomains The maximum number of domain names you want returned. Used by ListDomains. The range is 1 to 100. The default setting is 100. Optional
MaxNumberOfItems Maximum number of items to return in the response. The range is 1 to 2500. The default setting is 100. Optional
NextToken String that tells Amazon SimpleDB where to start the next list of domain or item names. Used by ListDomains and GetAttributes. Optional
SelectExpression String that specifies the query that is executed against the domain. Optional
Signature For more information, see Signing REST Requests. Required
SignatureMethod Required when you use signature version 2 with REST requests. For more information, see Signing REST Requests. Conditional
SignatureVersion For more information, see Signing REST Requests. Required
Timestamp For more information, see Request Authentication. Required
Version Version of the API. The version of the API described in this document is 2009-04-15. Required

Request Parameter Formats

The following are specifications for Amazon SimpleDB user data:

User Data Specifications

  • Domain names—Allowed characters are a-z, A-Z, 0-9, '_', '-', and '.' .

    Domain names can be between 3 and 255 characters long.

  • Item names, attribute names, and attribute values—Allowed characters are all UTF-8 characters valid in XML documents.

    Control characters and any sequences that are not valid in XML are returned Base64-encoded. For more information, see Working with XML-Restricted Characters.

Quotes and escape characters

User data in query expressions must be enclosed in single quotes. If a single quote is used within the user data, it must be escaped using a backslash. If a backslash is used within user data, it must be escaped as well. Examples:

Original String Escaped String
'John's AWS account' 'John\'s AWS account'
c:\path\constant 'c:\\path\\constant'