Besides these generic response groups, there are very specific ones. For example, if you want to return
images of the items included in a response, you would include the Image response group in the request.
If you wanted pricing information, you would include the Offer response group in the request. To get
browsenode information, you'd include the BrowseNode response group. The specificity of the response
groups enables you to return only the information you want.
Each Product Advertising API operation can only work with a subset of all Product Advertising API response
groups. The valid response groups that each Product Advertising API operation can use is listed in the
Product Advertising API Reference Guide.
All Product Advertising API operations use some response group by default. So, specifying additional
response groups is optional. Every Product Advertising API operation uses the Request response group,
which echoes operation name and the input parameters sent in the request. The other response groups
used by default vary by the operation. For example,
CartCreate
,
CartAdd
, and
CartModify
use, by
default, the Cart response group, which provides detailed information about the items in a cart. The API
Reference Guide lists the default response groups used by each operation.
Now, when you read requests in this guide, your eye should jump to the
Operation
parameter and all
of the required and optional parameters associated with the specified Product Advertising API operation.
Request Limitations
Some Product Advertising API operations have many parameters and, as you will learn in a future section,
you can combine multiple single requests in one, longer batch request. The upper limit is bounded by the
maximum number of characters that can be in a request. The maximum number differs by browser. For
example, the limit for a URL in Microsoft's Internet Explorer is a little more than 2000 characters. It would
be unusual to have a request that approached this upper boundary.
REST Syntax
Topics
•
Spaces in Requests (p. 49)
•
Separator Characters (p. 50)
•
Setting Parameter Values (p. 50)
One of the values of using REST is that its syntax is simple, which makes REST requests easy to read.
This section summarizes all of the REST syntax rules that you must keep in mind when creating a REST
request.
Spaces in Requests
Because a REST request is a URL, there can be no spaces between the parts of a request. A browser
will stop reading when it runs across the first space. For example, if the last parameter read,
Keywords=Blue Shirts
, the request would end on "Blue." "Shirts" would never be read. If you have
key words, such as names, that do have spaces in them, you must URL-encode the space using %20.
For the preceding example to work, you would include a URL-encoded space, as follows.
Keywords=Blue%20Shirts
The same problem occurs if you put spaces between the parameters in a request, as shown in the following
example.
SearchIndex=Apparel& Keywords=Shirt
API Version 2011-08-01
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Product Advertising API Developer Guide
Request Limitations
