The anyURI type is used most often to specify Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), such as a web page URL (e.g., ViewItemURL) or a file location URL (e.g., PictureURL), but can also be used for email addresses and other valid URI schemes.

In the API, some fields that are currently defined as booleans might later be redefined as int values (enumerations) or as code lists. This would occur if more choices besides true and false become available. In these rare cases, we use a compatibility level to give you time to modify your application as needed. See the eBay Schema Versioning Strategy for information about how this works.

Date-time values are in the ISO 8601 date and time format. Hours are in 24-hour format (e.g., 2:00:00pm is 14:00:00). Unless otherwise specified, all date-time values are recorded in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), also known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or Zulu (because the time portion of the time stamp ends with a Z). That is, time values do not reflect the time zone shown on the eBay Web site. Here is an example of the date-time format:

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.SSSZ (e.g., 2004-08-04T19:09:02.768Z)

See Time Values for information about how to convert between local time zones and GMT.

We use the dateTime data type to convey start and end times, the official eBay time, and other time values.

In the API, most fields of type decimal can contain the digits 0-9, a hyphen to designate negative numbers as needed, and a period (".") for the decimal separator. Decimal values should never include a thousands separator.

A whole number (i.e., without a period) can be passed as a decimal value.

We typically use the decimal data type to convey values related to units of measure. See individual topics for specific restrictions beyond this for fields of type decimal.

In the API, most fields of type double can contain the digits 0-9, a hyphen to designate negative numbers as needed, and a period (".") for the decimal separator. Double values should never include a thousands separator.

We typically use the double data type to convey values related to monetary amounts. See AmountType, below.

In some cases, a whole number (i.e., without a period) can be passed or returned as a double value. See individual topics for specific restrictions beyond this for fields of type double.

Duration values are in the ISO 8601 duration format, where P represents "Period", nY represents the number of years, nM the number of months, nD the number of days, T is the date/time separator, nH the number of hours, nM the number of minutes, and nS the number of seconds. So P2DT23H32M51S means "A period of 2 days, 23 hours, 32 minutes, and 51 seconds".

PnYnMnDTnH nMnS (e.g., P2DT23H32M51S)

We use the duration data type to convey values like the time left until a listing ends. For ended listings, the time left is PT0S (zero seconds).

In the API, most fields of type float can contain the digits 0-9, a hyphen to designate negative numbers as needed, and a period (".") for the decimal separator. Float values should never include a thousands separator.

We typically use the float data type to convey values related to percentages. See individual topics for specific restrictions beyond this for fields of type float.

In the API, most fields of type int can contain digits 0-9, and hyphen to indicate negative numbers. Some input fields restrict the input to particular values or a range of values. These cases are noted in the associated topic for the specific input field.

We typically use the int data type for enumerations, counts (e.g., how many items are returned), quantities, certain kinds of IDs (other IDs are strings), and similar concepts.

Character entity references are used for escaping markup-significant characters. For example, use &amp; for the & (ampersand) character, &lt; for the < (less-than sign) character, and &gt; for the > (greater-than sign) character. It is a good idea to escape such characters in requests instead of using a CDATA construct. Responses from eBay do not include CDATA constructs.

Note that messages from eBay may contain HTML or XML markup within the message text. In this case, the markup elements within the text are escaped (e.g., &lt;![CDATA[ ... ]]&gt;).

Some string input fields (e.g., QueryKeywords) do not have a known set of possible values. For these fields, the documentation specifies the maximum permitted length in characters. If you are using a URL for your request, and you need to use the & (ampersand) character as part of a string value (e.g. Bausch & Lomb in QueryKeywords), use &amp;.

xs:string is part of the XML schema namespace defined as:

xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"

A set of normalized strings.

In the API, this type of string contains no white space, by convention.

We typically use token to constrain a field to a specified set of normalized string values. For such a field, we define these values in an enumeration that uses token as its base type. For example, DestinationCountryCode uses CountryCodeType, which defines the standard set of country abbreviations that eBay recognizes.

If "CustomCode" is returned as an enumeration value, it means we're sending you a placeholder value because we think your application won't recogize the real value. This occurs when your URL (or HTTP header) specifies a version that is older than the version in which the real value was introduced in the API. To get the real value, upgrade your application to be compatible with a newer version of the API. See the eBay Schema Versioning Strategy for details about how your request version controls output data.

A double value (e.g., 1.00 or 1.0) is meaningful as an amount when accompanied by a specification of the currency, in which case the value specifies the amount in that currency.

In the API, an object of type AmountType expresses both the value (a decimal) and the currency.

We typically use the AmountType data type to specify details such as prices, fees, costs, and payments.

In some cases, a whole number (i.e., without a period) can be passed or returned as a monetary value. This is necessary to support certain currencies that are only expressed as whole numbers (like the Italian Lira and Spanish Peseta).

Because a double is used to represent the amount, this also means whole monetary amounts may be returned with only one 0 after the decimal. For example, a dollar value could be returned as 5.0 instead of 5.00 in calls like GetSingleItem. See individual topics for specific restrictions beyond this for fields of type Amount.