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Integrate Your Data with Amazon Web Services


Many ETL platforms now offer the flexibility of integrating with Web Services so that business visibility and decision-making can be improved. Dr. Pradeep Tapadiya gives you an overview of how to use Amazon Web Services in your applications.

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Integrate Your Data with Amazon Web Services

Author: Dr. Pradeep Tapadiya

 

Most organizations are moving towards a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for standards-based application interoperability. Although there were many attempts at SOA in the past (DCOM, CORBA, etc.), the current definition uses Web Services as the means of interaction.

Major web-based businesses such as Amazon, eBay, Google, etc. are providing Web Services that can be consumed within your applications. Many ETL platforms now offer the flexibility of integrating with Web Services so that business visibility and decision-making can be improved. Here, I show you the steps involved in accessing data from Amazon's E-Commerce Web Services (AWS). Using AWS, for example, you can compare prices of your inventory items against that of Amazon. Enjoy!

Step 1: Get your subscription ID from Amazon
Register at http://www.amazon.com/aws (free) and receive your subscription ID. This ID is needed when Web Service calls are made to Amazon.

Step 2: Get the technical documentation

AWS provide powerful search functionality. The technical documentation is handy in order to understand the supported fields to search on.

Step 3: Generate proxy code for the Web Service

The name of the Web service, the parameters it accepts, and the return values are defined using a language called WSDL. The WSDL definition for AWS can be found at http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/AWSECommerceService.wsdl. Using your programming framework, generate the client side proxy code for AWS.

Step 4: Define your search criteria

In your application, define the search criteria. Here are various fields you need to define:

  • SearchIndex: The category to search for. For example, Books, Music, Electronics, etc. Note that names are case-sensitive.

  • Power: The field to search upon. The field is based on the specified search index.

  • ResponseGroup: The result of your search may contain hundreds of fields. You must specify

  • the field-groups that you are interested in. You can also specify generic groups Small, Medium, or Large.

  • Sort: The field upon which the response must be sorted. For example, for Books, you can sort by salesrank, pricerank, etc.

Here is an example in C#:

ItemSearchRequest irs = new ItemSearchRequest();
irs.SearchIndex = "Books";
irs.Power = "Title: Data Integration";
irs.ResponseGroup = new string[] {"Small"};
irs.Sort = "salesrank";
ItemSearchRequest[] allRequests = new ItemSearchRequest[] { irs };

Step 5: Associate your subscription ID

You now need to associate your subscription ID with your search condition. Here is a code snippet:

ItemSearch itemSearch = new ItemSearch();
itemSearch.SubscriptionId = "XXXXXXXXXX";
itemSearch.Request = allRequests;

Step 6: Call the Web Service

Invoke AWS, passing in the necessary parameters, and get the response back. Here is a code snippet:

AWSECommerceService aws = new AWSECommerceService();
ItemSearchResponse response = aws.ItemSearch(itemSearch);
Items info = response.Items[0];

You can now iterate through Items collection and get your data. Field ItemAttributes contains sub-fields containing your data.

Hopefully your ETL provider has already implemented the logic so that you don't need to write the code. However, I hope this gives you an insight on what happens underneath.

New Partners
We are happy to announce the addition of Premier Results Inc. www.premierresults.com and Third Wave Business Systems www.twbs.com to our growing list of partners. xFusion will help them to streamline customer migrations, and integrating customer data across business applications.

New xFusion Developers Network Website

xFusion customers now have an expanding support network to gain technical guidance. Many new resources are being added to this site every week. Also, a new developers forum will complement this service soon. See xFusion Developer Network online here: http://main.xfusiondn.com/

New Events
Software Labs will attend SAP Americas Field Kick-Off Meeting ’07 in Las Vegas, January 14-17. If you are a SAP partner we will see you there!

Did you know that xFusion supports all date-time formats?
Using xFusion Studio we can define various ways to parse date-time formats. Any date-time string format can be converted to date. Read more…

Support Question:
Hi Support,

I have column "Item" that is a 12 digit numeric field.
I want to do a statement that says if position 6, 7 & 8 of this 12 digit number
is ABC, then fill another column with a value.
(For example, XXXXXABCXXXX)
If position 6, 7 & 8 of the item # is 800 then fill column named itemClass = fabric.
If these 3 positions hold 900, fill column named itemClass = bags.
If these 3 positions hold 907, fill column named itemClass = blinds.
Can you tell me how I would do this in Fusion?

Reply:

Hi,
Please use our transform function Switch to achieve this.
The query looks like this.

AddColumn (
[[Data]],
Switch
(
Mid([Data.Item], 6, 3) = "800", "fabric",
Mid([Data.Item], 6, 3) = "900", "bags",
Mid([Data.Item], 6, 3) = "907", "blinds"
)
as ItemClass
)

Hope this helps.

Support


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