Web data into FileMaker

[Merit Solutions]

I need to display dynamic price data from an established web source field into a FileMaker database. For example if the record in Filemaker has an ISBN number, is there an easy way to show the current Amazon price for that product in the FileMaker record?

[Raybaudi]

How would you query the Amazon site for a known ISBN ?

Which is your FileMaker version ?

[Merit Solutions]

I am using FileMaker 11. I would manually enter a known ISBN number into the database and would need it to query Amazon and return the latest price and return it to a price field in FileMaker.

Edited July 16, 2010 by Guest

[fseipel]

Screen scraping is one alternative; You can bring the data in from the Amazon product detail page. The URL is easy to calculate; just go to books, advanced search, and substitute your ISBN in the URL. You can then parse the data with WebViewer.

The preferred method is significantly more involved. This would be Amazon Web Services Product Advertising API. http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=5 -- I wrote a plug-in a while back to sign requests and execute queries. Alternately you can write your own code to achieve same. Web Services is preferred due to faster access, not 'breaking' when Amazon changes HTML pages, and the ability to request price data for 10 items in a single query.

[Merit Solutions]

I am not sure how one can parse data from the webviewer. According to FileMaker documentation, the web viewer can not return data to fields in FileMaker.

[fseipel]

Data from a WebViewer window may be retrieved using GetLayoutObjectAttribute. There are numerous tutorials on this, http://web.mit.edu/ist/usergroups/filemaker/fmug/pres/scraping.pdf might be worth looking at. Actual calculation of the signature (for a Product Advertising API request) is problematic in Filemaker Scriptmaker because the HMAC SHA256 encoding required, is difficult to implement in a script.

You may want to review this thread which addresses some options. http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/message.jspa?messageID=137922