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# Bugzilla::WebService::Server::JSONRPC

- NAME
- DESCRIPTION
- JSON-RPC
- CONNECTING
  - Connecting via GET
  - JSONP
- PARAMETERS
- ERRORS
- SEE ALSO
- Methods in need of POD

# NAME

Bugzilla::WebService::Server::JSONRPC - The JSON-RPC Interface to Bugzilla

# DESCRIPTION

This documentation describes things about the Bugzilla WebService that are specific to JSON-RPC. For a general overview of the Bugzilla WebServices, see Bugzilla::WebService.

Please note that everything about this JSON-RPC interface is EXPERIMENTAL. If you want a fully stable API, please use the `Bugzilla::WebService::Server::XMLRPC|XML-RPC` interface.

# JSON-RPC

Bugzilla supports both JSON-RPC 1.0 and 1.1. We recommend that you use JSON-RPC 1.0 instead of 1.1, though, because 1.1 is deprecated.

At some point in the future, Bugzilla may also support JSON-RPC 2.0.

The JSON-RPC standards are described at http://json-rpc.org/.

# CONNECTING

The endpoint for the JSON-RPC interface is the `jsonrpc.cgi` script in your Bugzilla installation. For example, if your Bugzilla is at `bugzilla.yourdomain.com`, then your JSON-RPC client would access the API via: `http://bugzilla.yourdomain.com/jsonrpc.cgi`

## Connecting via GET

The most powerful way to access the JSON-RPC interface is by HTTP POST. However, for convenience, you can also access certain methods by using GET (a normal webpage load). Methods that modify the database or cause some action to happen in Bugzilla cannot be called over GET. Only methods that simply return data can be used over GET.

For security reasons, when you connect over GET, cookie authentication is not accepted. If you want to authenticate using GET, you have to use the `Bugzilla_login` and `Bugzilla_password` method described at "LOGGING IN" in Bugzilla::WebService.

To connect over GET, simply send the values that you'd normally send for each JSON-RPC argument as URL parameters, with the `params` item being a JSON string.

The simplest example is a call to `Bugzilla.time`:

     jsonrpc.cgi?method=Bugzilla.time

Here's a call to `User.get`, with several parameters:

     jsonrpc.cgi?method=User.get&params=[ { "ids": [1,2], "names": ["user@domain.com"] } ]

Although in reality you would url-encode the `params` argument, so it would look more like this:

     jsonrpc.cgi?method=User.get&params=%5B+%7B+%22ids%22%3A+%5B1%2C2%5D%2C+%22names%22%3A+%5B%22user%40domain.com%22%5D+%7D+%5D

You can also specify `version` as a URL parameter, if you want to specify what version of the JSON-RPC protocol you're using, and `id` as a URL parameter if you want there to be a specific `id` value in the returned JSON-RPC response.

## JSONP

When calling the JSON-RPC WebService over GET, you can use the "JSONP" method of doing cross-domain requests, if you want to access the WebService directly on a web page from another site. JSONP is described at http://bob.pythonmac.org/archives/2005/12/05/remote-json-jsonp/.

To use JSONP with Bugzilla's JSON-RPC WebService, simply specify a `callback` parameter to jsonrpc.cgi when using it via GET as described above. For example, here's some HTML you could use to get the data from `Bugzilla.time` on a remote website, using JSONP:

     <script type="text/javascript"
             src="http://bugzilla.example.com/jsonrpc.cgi?method=Bugzilla.time&amp;callback=foo">

That would call the `Bugzilla.time` method and pass its value to a function called `foo` as the only argument. All the other URL parameters (such as `params`, for passing in arguments to methods) that can be passed to `jsonrpc.cgi` during GET requests are also available, of course. The above is just the simplest possible example.

The values returned when using JSONP are identical to the values returned when not using JSONP, so you will also get error messages if there is an error.

The `callback` URL parameter may only contain letters, numbers, periods, and the underscore (`_`) character. Including any other characters will cause Bugzilla to throw an error. (This error will be a normal JSON-RPC response, not JSONP.)

# PARAMETERS

For JSON-RPC 1.0, the very first parameter should be an object containing the named parameters. For example, if you were passing two named parameters, one called `foo` and the other called `bar`, the `params` element of your JSON-RPC call would look like:

     "params": [{ "foo": 1, "bar": "something" }]

For JSON-RPC 1.1, you can pass parameters either in the above fashion or using the standard named-parameters mechanism of JSON-RPC 1.1.

`dateTime` fields are strings in the standard ISO-8601 format: `YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ`, where `T` and `Z` are a literal T and Z, respectively. The "Z" means that all times are in UTC timezone--times are always returned in UTC, and should be passed in as UTC. (Note: The JSON-RPC interface currently also accepts non-UTC times for any values passed in, if they include a time-zone specifier that follows the ISO-8601 standard, instead of "Z" at the end. This behavior is expected to continue into the future, but to be fully safe for forward-compatibility with all future versions of Bugzilla, it is safest to pass in all times as UTC with the "Z" timezone specifier.)

`base64` fields are strings that have been base64 encoded. Note that although normal base64 encoding includes newlines to break up the data, newlines within a string are not valid JSON, so you should not insert newlines into your base64-encoded string.

All other types are standard JSON types.

# ERRORS

JSON-RPC 1.0 and JSON-RPC 1.1 both return an `error` element when they throw an error. In Bugzilla, the error contents look like:

     { message: 'Some message here', code: 123 }

So, for example, in JSON-RPC 1.0, an error response would look like:

     {
       result: null,
       error: { message: 'Some message here', code: 123 },
       id: 1
     }

Every error has a "code", as described in "ERRORS" in Bugzilla::WebService. Errors with a numeric `code` higher than 100000 are errors thrown by the JSON-RPC library that Bugzilla uses, not by Bugzilla.

# SEE ALSO

Bugzilla::WebService

# Methods in need of POD

response
response_header
cgi
retrieve_json_from_get
create_json_coder
type
handle_login
datetime_format_outbound

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