Is there anybody here? I've made a feature request and I would have expected the courtesy of a reply or an acknowledgment from someone in charge, or is this project dead?

I would like that in the same reply along the data itself I could request, with a suitable extra url-argument to have information about element name of each record, the field names to expect from the reply and their data type so that if I ask for the following URL (notice the las two arguments):

CODE

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=desc%20flickr.photos.search&format=json&callback=cbfunc&diagnostics=false&fieldinfo=true

I get something like:

CODE

cbfunc({
 "query":{
  "count":"10",
  "created":"2009-07-02T08:05:15Z",
  "lang":"en-US",
  "updated":"2009-07-02T08:05:15Z",
  "uri":"http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/yql?q=select+*+from+flickr.photos.search+where+text+%3D+%22YDN%22",
  "fieldinfo":{
	"recordName":"photo",
	"fields":[
	    "key":[{
            "name":"farm",
            "type":"xs:string"
         },
         {
            "name":"id",
            "type":"xs:string"
         },
        {
           "name":"isfamily",
           "type":"xs:boolean"
         },
	   ......
	  ]
	},

  "results":{
   "photo":[{
     "farm":"3",
     "id":"3679272771",
     "isfamily":"0",
     "isfriend":"0",
     "ispublic":"1",
     "owner":"28401989@N04",
     "secret":"6ace55fce0",
     "server":"2643",
     "title":"ConvergeSC Speakers"
    },
  ....

so that instead of assuming the data structure from how it comes, I can actually know for sure and even (and this is the most important) know when the data is other than string, an information I have no way of guessing out. Numbers sort differently than strings containing numeric characters, but there is no way to tell one from the other from the received data. There is also no way to tell a boolean apart from a string containing a single digit 0 or 1. It is also good to get this information in the same reply message as the data itself, to avoid twice the latency time, instead of going to a DESC command first or more than that for complex queries. Also, what the actual fields ended up being, in case any failed.

Greetings. So does this mean I can't do accurate numeric greater/less than queries in YQL? Since values are all seen as strings? I have, for example, results of the the form:

"game": [
{
"umpire": "",
"game": "1.0",
"temp": "73.0",
"runs_home": "4.0",
"home": "nya",
"type": "R",
"runs_away": "2.0",
"away": "tor",
"game_id": "honkers",
"local_time": "13:05",
"date": "",
"wind": "5.0",
"wind_dir": "Out to RF"
}

And I'm looking to query for one-run games. Is this not possible (or a rather complicated endeavor utilizing IN and arrays of strings) with YQL? Or am I missing something simple here?

In the YQL query you can still use greater than and less than. Since we know very little about the data, we use coercion i.e try to convert the right hand side value and the left hand side value into numeric types and then compare them.
Since YQL acts over a large number of data sources, we use the coercion technique to introspect the api. I suspect that this can also be done on the client side in JS where you would coerce and find about the data.

hope that helps
Nagesh