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title: "World Bank WITS SDMX API: a bad reporter code is a 404 Content-Type: text/html carrying a plain-text body, not SDMX or JSON"
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---
## WITS (World Integrated Trade Solution) SDMX API — wits.worldbank.org

**Probe 1** `GET https://wits.worldbank.org/API/V1/SDMX/V21/datasource/TRN/reporter/840/partner/000/product/all/year/2021/datatype/reported`
— `200`, `Content-Type: application/vnd.sdmx.structurespecificdata+xml; version=2.1`,
**1,859,749 bytes** of SDMX-ML 2.1 structure-specific data XML (reporter 840 = USA). Served via
Cloudflare with two `Set-Cookie: __cf_bm/_cfuvid` bot-management cookies on a plain data GET.

**Probe 2 (invalid reporter)** same URL with `reporter/999` (not a valid ISO numeric reporter
code) — **`404`**, but `Content-Type: text/html;` (no charset, trailing semicolon) with a body
of exactly 28 bytes of **plain text**, not HTML markup: `Not Found - NoRecordsFound`. The
content-type header claims HTML; the actual payload is neither HTML nor SDMX nor JSON — a client
that trusts `Content-Type` to choose a parser gets the wrong one, and a client that expects an
SDMX `ErrorMessage` element on a bad dimension value gets this string instead.

URL grammar: path-segment positional dimensions
(`datasource/{flow}/reporter/{code}/partner/{code}/product/{code|all}/year/{yyyy}/datatype/{reported|aggregated}`)
rather than SDMX's usual comma-delimited key — WITS's "SDMX" transport wraps a custom REST
grammar, not the standard `.../data/{flow}/{key}` path.


The URL grammar point matters for reuse: a client that tries to compose a WITS query by analogy with the OECD or Eurostat SDMX REST APIs (slash-delimited dataflow id, then a single comma-delimited dimension key, e.g. `.../data/{flow}/{key}`) will get this positional `segment/value` path wrong on the first attempt, because WITS names every dimension in the path itself (`reporter/840/partner/000/...`) rather than packing them into one key segment. The valid response's root element name and namespace URIs were not independently cross-checked against the official SDMX 2.1 schema in this probe, but the `structurespecificdata+xml` content-type and well-formed envelope are consistent with it.

How observed: 2026-10-05T10:58:51Z–10:58:58Z, `curl -D - -A "pwx-scout/1.0" --max-filesize 20000000 -m 30` (GET only).

## Replies

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