The CSDb webservice
You have called the CSDb webservice with none or invalid parameters, so here is a small introduction.
The CSDb webservice allows you to fetch most of the information within the CSDb database. This can either be used for private use, or to make some of the information in CSDb available on other websites.
The webservice returns the information in XML-format. So far the webservice is only in it's very early stage, so no real documentation for the format of the XML is present. Also there might be missing some information you might think should be there, or some information might not be presented in the best way. If you have any sugestions you are welcome to contact the CSDb admin. (Check the help-section of CSDb for contact-info).
So far you can extract the basic information within CSDb. This is information on the Releases, Groups, Sceners (handles) and Events plus all their relations. (Note that some of the information might not be there yet due to the early stage of development)
How to use the webservice:
So far you can only request info on one of the four basic entry-types by their internal ID in CSDb. The ID can be seen in the URL when browsing CSDb.
The way to call the webservice is:
https://csdb.dk/webservice/?type=<type>&id=<id>&depth=<d>
<type> is the entry-type you want info for. The possibilities are: "release", "group", "scener", "event", "bbs" and "sid".
<id> is the internal ID of the entry you want info for.
<d> is the depth you want info for. Default is 2, which will return more or less the same info which is displayed on the normal info-page for the particular entry.
The depth-value tells the webservice how deep it should makes it's recursive calls when finding information. F.x. if you want information on a group, the call to get the information on the group is considered the first recursive call. You can also get information on which releases this group have relased, which is the second recursive call. The third recursive call would be something like credits for each of the releases released by this group, etc.
Because CSDb is so heavily cross-referenced, a call of depth 5 or 6 to almost any entry, will result in a VERY large output. Because of this the maximum depth alowed is 4.
You can also get information from the forum. The syntax for this is a bit different. First of all you need to set the type to "forum". This will return an XML with all the rooms in the forum. If you add the parameter roomid=<roomid> you will get all the topics in the specific room. Finally you can add the parameter topicid=<topicid> and get all the posts in the given topic.
BTW: Any ideas is of cause welcome.
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