Hey Folks, One of the things that we've heard a lot of feedback about is the Sandbox's ReportService, and the fact that the "dummy" report returned from the Sandbox is not particularly useful. I've also mentioned that I'm going to try to do something to make more useful information available. Unfortunately, we're not in a position to make modifications to the Sandbox's ReportService at this time to have it return more realistic dummy data.
I've been thinking about different ways to allow developers to get access to a wider range of sample reports against which they can then test their code. One of the things I've been suggesting for a while is that developers run an AdWords report in the Production environment (via the API or the web interface) against their Production account and use that resulting report XML data when testing their code. This solution would work for developers who already have access to a real AdWords account that receives traffic, but it doesn't work that well for developers who are just starting out with AdWords and don't have any Production traffic yet. Another approach would be to compile a dozen or so sample reports and post them somewhere for folks to download, but there are millions of possible report type, aggregation, and column combinations, without even getting into date ranges. It would be hard to come up with a representative set of reports that would make everyone happy. So what I was thinking of doing is writing a fairly simple web application that would allow developers to specify a report type, aggregation type, selected columns, date range, and the number of campaigns/ad groups/keywords they'd like to simulate, and then output report XML with random data that matches the format specified. It would be roughly equivalent to the AdWords web interface's Report Center scheduling options, without any real data being used. The idea would be to use it a few times to generate reports with exactly the types of columns and date ranges that you're interested in, and then to use the resulting report XML to test your report parsing code. I wanted to gauge whether there would be interest in such a web application before I sat down and started work on it, so your feedback is encouraged. Cheers, -Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "AdWords API Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/adwords-api?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
