Editing Contribute: Plugins/ImportPluginsAWS (section)

= Import Plugin Tutorial 2: Amazon Web Services =

In the [[Contribute:_Plugins/ImportPluginsCSV|last tutorial]] we created an import plugin that took data which needed very little modification to import into the respository. The column names in the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-Separated_Values CSV] file matched the names of metadata fields present in the repository. In this tutorial we'll look at importing data that needs some modification to be imported, needs more error checking and is obtained in a different way.

We will be using Amazon's E-Commerce Webservice to import books from their website into our respository given a list of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIN ASIN].

We will be accessing the service using a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST REST] approach, communicating with the server using URL parameters and retrieving an XML document in response to our request. It is also possible to access their services using [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP SOAP], but that will not be discussed here.