Hi Jeff, Your idea of a sample report application is exactly what I was hoping would be available to test reporting. For now I will take your suggestion in creating a report from our Production campaign and use the XML as a test.
What our company is proposing is to have our clients log into our website and run reports (through the API) against the campaigns that we are administering for them. The reports would be pretty standard and we wouldn't allow much filter selection. >From my understanding, the reports get generated and sent to a URL. I would then have to navigate to that URL to get the XML and parse it. We want to display the output in a grid (we use Telerik) so I would need to parse the XML into a database and have the grid bound to the data in the database. Is that pretty much the only way to accomplish displaying a report through the API into a grid? Thanks Tom On Feb 25, 3:25 pm, AdWords API Advisor <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
