GeoNames Forum

Hi, in the search API I would like to provide multiple featureCode (the PCL*)
But when using the autocomplete jQuery API the request issued is in the form :
http://ws.geonames.org/searchJSON?featureCode[]=PCLS&featureCode[]=PCLI&...
what is quite correct according to the HTTP specification but isn't accepted by geonames.
Would you consider supporting this way of passing multiple values to an argument ?

You are right : this syntax should work.
@Marc : is it easy to implement ?

If you need to get all countries, use countryInfo webservice :
http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html#countryInfo

are you sure this is correct? I can't find any reference to this notation with square brackes [] except for one or two php examples. The service is using java servlet and they don't seem to support this notation.

Marc

That's right, the syntax to pass the parameter multiple-values to the servers is specified by the HTML spec : appending [] to the field "name".
(http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.2.1)

How the server should handle this isn't specified as it just depends on the server-side language.
AFAIK the HTTP spec, doesn't talk about that (it's probably outside its scope unlike I previously asserted)

If its hard (or not wanted) to implement to support on the java servlet side, I will ask on the jQuery side for an option to support the "non-HTML" notation.

Thanks for the answers.

What about a RegExp syntax using "|" ?
http://ws.geonames.org/searchJSON?featureCode=PCLS|PCLI

drzraf: I don't find any reference to '[]' on the page you link to.

The service already supports multiple parameters:
http://ws.geonames.org/search?q=london&maxRows=10&featureCode=PPLC&featureCode=PPL

Just the brackets behind the parametername are not supported.