3/1/10 - This code no longer works, as Amazon requires Authenticated REST queries

Using REST to do an ItemSearch Amazon ASIN query and transform the resulting XML into HTML.

Prerequisites:

Basic knowledge of HTML, XML, PHP
An Amazon developer ID
An Amazon associate ID - *5/7/09 update: Use AssociateTag, not associate-id, to get credit in the purchaseurl*
A web hosting server running PHP
An XML transformation tool (PHP 5 and development environments like PEAR and Zend have built-in tools for transforming XML. As one of the few people still running PHP 4 thanks to Yahoo, I'm using Macromedia's MM_XSLTransform.class.php.

Here is the query (substitute the bracketed phrases with your own ids)

<?php require_once('includes/MM_XSLTransform/MM_XSLTransform.class.php'); $restquery = "http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService &AWSAccessKeyId=[your access key]&Operation=ItemLookup&ResponseGroup= Medium&AssociateTag=[your associate id]&ItemId=" . $asin; $mm_xsl = new MM_XSLTransform(); $mm_xsl->setXML($restquery); $mm_xsl->setXSL("aws1.xsl"); ?>

You can pass the ASIN as a URL parameter or pull it from a database. Next I run the transform. The if condition displays a back button if the user is coming from a page in my domain

 <?php 

echo $mm_xsl->Transform();

if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) && strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], "arcster.com")) {

echo "<p><a href=\"" . $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] . "\">Back</a></p>";

}

?>

Here's what the xsl file looks like. Thanks to KTS on stackoverflow who provided some much needed help with my transform


							<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

  <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

							  xmlns:tns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

							  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"

							  xmlns:a="http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2005-10-05">

  <xsl:output method="html"/>

  <xsl:template match="/">

  <table border="0">

  <tr>

  <td>

  <h2>arcster.com - results from amazon.com</h2>

  </td>

  </tr>

  <tr>

  <td valign="top">

  <xsl:apply-templates select="a:ItemLookupResponse/a:Items"/>

  </td>

  </tr>

  </table>

  </xsl:template>
							 <xsl:template match="a:Items">

  <table border="0">

  <xsl:apply-templates select="a:Item"/>

  </table>

  </xsl:template>
							 <xsl:template match="a:Item">

  <tr>

  <td>

  <img>

  <xsl:attribute name="src">

  <xsl:value-of select="a:SmallImage/a:URL" />

  </xsl:attribute>

  <xsl:attribute name="alt">

  <xsl:value-of select="a:ItemAttributes/a:Title" />

  </xsl:attribute>

  <xsl:attribute name="align">left</xsl:attribute>

  </img>

  <a>

  <xsl:attribute name="href">

  <xsl:value-of select="a:DetailPageURL" />

  </xsl:attribute>

  <xsl:value-of select="a:ItemAttributes/a:Title" />

  </a>

  <br/>

  </td>

  </tr>

  <tr>

  <td>

							  Price: <xsl:value-of select="a:ItemAttributes/a:ListPrice/a:FormattedPrice" /><br />

  <xsl:if test="a:ItemAttributes/a:Artist">

							  Artist: <xsl:value-of select="a:ItemAttributes/a:Artist" />

  </xsl:if>

  <xsl:if test="a:ItemAttributes/a:Author">

							  Author: <xsl:value-of select="a:ItemAttributes/a:Author" />

  </xsl:if>

  

  </td>

  </tr>

  </xsl:template>

  </xsl:stylesheet>

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