New ECS Release: 2005-07-27

Second Important Note: Documentation and Release Notes links have been fixed.

Important Note: This item has been changed since it was first posted. The WSDL version was corrected, and the information about searching based on availability has been removed. The searching capability worked fine on our test servers but did not work as expected when we put it into production. We will fix this problem as soon as possible; watch this blog for updated information.

We have rolled out a new release of ECS today. The WSDL file is dated 2005-07-26 (a previous version of this posting listed it as 2005-07-27, which was incorrect).

New features in this release include access to additional product images (including color swatches), spelling correction in ItemSearch, inclusion of the Subject field in the data returned for books, inclusion of the MPN (Manufacturer's Part Number) for each item, better search results using so-called binned searches, similar products, new releases, and top sellers returned as part of the results of certain shopping cart operations, access to new releases and top sellers for each browse node, better support for the Classical Music search index, and documented support for the return of compressed (gzipped) XML responses, along with a number of important bug fixes.

For full information please consult the Release Notes and the Programmer's Guide. Please note that early versions of these documents contained references to the incorrect WSDL version and to the searching based on availability.

It is worth noting that most (if not all) of these features were added to the product as as result of feedback that we received from posts on the discussion board on in a weekly chat session.

 

Comments

[un papier]

I wrote an amazon sales rank tool to quickly lookup sales ranks. I have problem displaying images. The results are also not sorted by the sort-order (sort=salesrank) I asked for in my request. The order seems undefined. There is some inconsistency in the naming of parameters, for instance the value for SearchGroup is "SalesRank" where for Sort it is all lowercase "salesrank".

[Rich Manalang]

It appears that this change also affected the REST based web service... am I right? Users of my WordPress plugin (WP-Amazon - http://manalang.com/archives/2004/06/23/wordpress-plugin-wp-amazon/) have written in to tell my that my plugin no longer works. After a bit of research, I noticed that the XML format is different. Why wasn't this ECS release tagged with a different version so that applications that rely on this service don't have to worry about their apps breaking?

Rich

[un papier]

Now the images work correctly. Is there a fix for the Sort bug? the XML has sorted Items, despite my URL stating Sort=salesrank. Is the consistency in the valuee between ResponseGroup (SalesRank) and Sort (salestank) causing this?