- Take a string that I suspect is the title of a book, like "Huck Finn".
- Send this title to Amazon's Web Service, the Product Advertising API, to see if it's valid.
- Receive a response indicating the validity of this string as a title using number of matches to validate.
First, I want to do this manually. That, in and of itself, is not quick or easy. First, you have to sign up for an amazon account. That was simple, I already had one. My account was also already an associate, so that helped - I had poked around their site a bit already.
Then, you have to go to
https://aws.amazon.com
and get your amazon.com account registered for Product API access.
That done, you then go back to
https://aws-portal.amazon.com
Where you can now access your security credentials, under the heading of "Access Keys". From here, you grab your two string-based access ID's, and save them off someplace. You'll need them again in a minute.
Now, head to http://associates-amazon.s3.amazonaws.com/signed-requests/helper/index.html
This is a web page that will allow you submit requests manually. It's a syntax checker! Woohoo! A button I can push! :)
Now, I put in the information, and it spits back the various information about the URL. This is cool! Copy and paste the URL from the bottom-most text box labelled "Signed URL" into a spare browser window, and POOF! You have a fully formed amazon result right there! Success!
Most of this information is covered in one form or another in the official "Getting Started Guide":
http://s3.amazonaws.com/awsdocs/Associates/2010-06-01/prod-adv-api-gsg-2010-06-01.pdf
So, let's review:
You put in what essentially amounts to userid/password, along with some keywords, and out comes XML. SSIS's webservice component should be able to handle this no issue, right?
