RETS: Specifications Documents


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RETS Specification Documents

Documents are available in Portable Document Format (PDF). PDF files require the free Adobe Acrobat Reader or a similar program. (Many browsers are pre-configured to display PDF files automatically.)

Please send corrections and notices of errors to Paul Stusiak (pstusiak@falcontechnologies.com).

There are two currently active branches of RETS - the Web Services RETS2 branch and the HTTP RETS 1.x branch.

RETS 2:

Service Document
wsdl
Resources and Payloads Document - links and descriptions of schemas, payloads and metadata, and best practices.

RETS 1.7:

Standard Protocol
Standard-XML DTD
Metadata DTD

RETS 1.5:

Standard Protocol
Standard-XML DTD
Metadata DTD

RETS 1.X Standard Names Data Dictionary for the RETML DTD:

Provides data definitions, type information and StandardNames (well-known names) for RETS data interchange.

Adobe PDF
Microsoft Excel
XML Standard Names only
XML full dictionary

Incorporated Standards:

RETS is based on and incorporates a number of other standards. These standards documents should be consulted when implementing a RETS-compliant system.

RETS 2 Standards Web Services:

RETS2 uses existing Web Services (WS-*) standards. These are maintained by the W3C and OASIS. The Web Services standards used by RETS2 include:

XML (Extensible Markup Language):
XML is the backbone of RETS2 and much of Web Services. XML standards in RETS2 include:

Internet Standards:
RETS2 incorporates existing Internet standards. These are maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force. The internet standards in RETS2 include:

RFC 2045: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)
RFC 2046: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME part 2)
RFC 2822: Standard for ARPA Internet Text Messages

Dates:
Dates transmitted as RETS2 data are required to use ISO 8601 .

RETS 1.7 and RETS 1.5 Standards

Internet Standards
RETS relies heavily on existing Internet standards. These are maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force. The Internet standards in RETS include:

RFC 2616: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
RFC 2617: HTTP Authorization and Authentication
RFC 2109: HTTP State Management Mechanism
RFC 1321: The MD5 Authentication Algorithm
RFC 2315: PKCS #7: Cryptographic Message Syntax Version 1.5
RFC 2045: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)
RFC 2822: Standard for ARPA Internet Text Messages

Extensible Markup Language
XML 1.0 W3C's XML web site contans the XML language specification as well as a large collection of white papers and tutorials.

HTML
RETS relies on the HTML 4.01 Forms specification.

Dates
Dates transmitted as RETS data are required to use ISO 8601.

W3C's web site also contains open source code that may be used to implement parts of a
RETS-compliant system. This includes code to exchange HTTP and
to parse HTML. See the license information on the web site for W3C's terms of use for these libraries.