Charles Engelke's Blog

Note: this is part 4 of the Bookshelf Project I’m working on. Part 1 was a Chrome app “Hello, World” equivalent, part 2 added basic functionality, and part 3 finally called an Amazon web service. This part will finally parse the web service result and refine the call.

When I got to the end of the last post, the app was just dumping a lot of XML, formatted as text, into the web page. I want to pull just the data fields I’m looking for, format them, and put that in the page instead. Those fields are: author, title, release date, availability, list price, Amazon’s price, and a link to the Amazon page. So I copied the text from the page to a file and viewed it in a program that showed the XML as an outline. It’s way too big to show here, but the structure of the response looked like this:

• ItemLookup
  • Operation Request
  • Items
    • Request
    • Item
      • ASIN
      • DetailPageURL
      • ItemAttributes

It’s that Item element that actually has the response in it, with fields inside ItemAttributes containing most of the information I want. I see Author, Title, PublicationDate, and ListPrice inside of ItemAttributes, and DetailPageURL has the link I need. But I’m missing the availability and Amazon’s price. So back to the ItemLookup function’s documentation, which I’m a bit more ready to understand now. My request can include a specification of one or more ResponseGroup values. The default is just ItemAttributes, which is what I got in this sample response. But other groups might have the two fields I’m missing. After browsing through the documentation, I see that Offers includes both the Amount and Availability, so I’ll add that to my request. Doing so is easy: just change the line that specifies the requested ResponseGroup to:

      params.push({name: "ResponseGroup", value: "ItemAttributes,Offers"});

The resulting XML has what I need, structured as follows:

• ItemLookup
  • Operation Request
  • Items
    • Request
    • Item
      • ASIN
      • DetailPageURL
      • ItemAttributes
      • OfferSummary
      • Offers
        • Offer
          • OfferListing

The extra information I’m looking for is in the OfferListing element, which contains Price and Availability fields. The Price field (like the ListPrice field mentioned earlier) is itself complex, containing an Amount (an integer, apparently equal to the whole number of cents), a CurrencyCode (USD in my example), and a FormattedPrice. I’m going to go with the FormattedPrice field for now, but I may want to change my mind later.

Okay, this XML has the data I want, how do I get to it? This is the job of extractAndReturnResult, which currently looks like:

      function extractAndReturnResult(data, status, xhr){
         onSuccess(xhr.responseText);
      }

         $(data).find("Items Item ASIN")

         var asin = $(data).find("Items Item ASIN")[0].textContent;

      function extractAndReturnResult(data, status, xhr){
         var result = {
            asin:          $(data).find("Items Item ASIN")[0].textContent,
            author:        $(data).find("Items Item ItemAttributes Author")[0].textContent,
            title:         $(data).find("Items Item ItemAttributes Title")[0].textContent,
            releaseDate:   $(data).find("Items Item ItemAttributes PublicationDate")[0].textContent,
            listPrice:     $(data).find("Items Item ItemAttributes ListPrice FormattedPrice")[0].textContent,
            availability:  $(data).find("Items Item Offers Offer OfferListing Availability")[0].textContent,
            amazonPrice:   $(data).find("Items Item Offers Offer OfferListing Price FormattedPrice")[0].textContent,
            url:           $(data).find("Items Item DetailPageURL")[0].textContent
         };
         onSuccess(result);
      }

                     function(message){
                        message = message.replace(/&/g, "&");
                        message = message.replace(/</g, "&lt;");
                        message = message.replace(/>/g, "&gt;");
                        $("#results").append(message);
                     },

      function insertResponse(response){
         var html = '<a href="' + response.URL + '">';
         html = html + response.title + '</a> by ' + response.author;
         html = html + ' lists for ' + response.listPrice;
         html = html + ' but sells for ' + response.amazonPrice;
         html = html + '. It was released on ' + response.releaseDate;
         html = html + ' with availability ' + response.availability;
         html = html + '.';
         $("#results").append(html);
      }