New Module : CJM_Amazon allowing Amazon Associate Web Service data fetching

Awesome. I was just about to try and build something like this myself when my laptop died on me last week. So thanks for releasing it.

I’ll give it a test when my laptops back with me.

David

Just tried this out, it works perfectly! Now to figure out how to loop through a big list of books…

Cool, glad it’s working for you. Since I posted this new module I have found out that when linking to items in different locales you actually need to have a seperate affiliate account with that specific locale as well,in order to get paid that is!

I will be updating the module to include the ability to save mutiple affiliate accounts which are used according to the item locale. This will be at least a month away though as just moved house and have no internet. Will post updates here though.

Happy Christmas! (Good time for affiliate links!!)

Awesome, thanks Chris! So far so good in my implementation, just about done. You may want to think about adding a prefix to the {Author} tag in case you use the {exp:cjm_amazon:item} tag inside {exp:weblog:entries}. If you miss the Uppercase you get the logged in “author”. Other than that, awesome job.

Merry Christmas!

Oh hey, one other question. How difficult would it be to build in some caching functionality? We could look into it if we knew what variables the data come in on. Any insight you might have would be helpful. Thanks!

Just found this thread, and I was wondering if this module supports the authenticated calls that now have to be used when fetching data from Amazon? I’ve been using an old, no longer supported module for years, and it no longer works after that changed was introduced.

I was also wondering if the module was ever updated to allow for associate ids for two different locales?

Hi,

Currently the module does not have either of the features you mention. I am planning on updating it this week/weekend though. I had another enquiry the other day asking a similar question too.

I will post here again once I’ve completed the update.

Cheers,

Chris

I have been using the module and it works great. I noticed today that it isn’t pulling in any info from Amazon. I see it is broken on your website also. Could you point me in the correct direction to troubleshoot my problem. Thanks!

I have it creating a signed request now. I was wondering if you could explain how you are pulling in the associate info. I would like to have that pull in my public and private keys instead. I have the solution hard coded right now and would like to bring in those values dynamically. Thanks!

I believe it would be broken right now because Amazon started disallowing unsigned API requests mid-August, so it won’t work again until updated for the new request requirements. 😊

I have it working. I added a function that creates the signed request. I have hard coded my public and private keys into the solution.

I would like to see if I could put those keys into the space in the DB where the associate info now resides. My thinking was that since the associate info is no longer needed I could use Chris’ calls to fetch the keys instead. I haven’t gone through the whole module line by line to see what is actually being done.

Hope that helps clarify my last ask of Chris.

Thanks for the input! The module works great! I like how easy it was to get it working.

jasonkruit -

I have it working. I added a function that creates the signed request. I have hard coded my public and private keys into the solution

could you explain how you coded in the public and private keys and how you obtained them from AWS? What url are you sending the request to? And what do the parameters look like?

I am really struggling to understand this. The documentation and sample code at the Amazon site seems a bit confusing. I already have the Associate tag and the AWSAccessKeyId..

Your Access Key ID & Secret Access Key can be found in the menu under “Your Account->Security Credentials” on the AWS site.

Here is the function I used to sign the request.

function  aws_signed_request($region,$params,$public_key,$private_key)
    {

    $method = "GET";
    $host = "ecs.amazonaws".$region; // must be in small case
    $uri = "/onca/xml";
    
    
    $params["Service"]          = "AWSECommerceService";
    $params["AWSAccessKeyId"]   = $public_key;
    $params["Timestamp"]        = gmdate("Y-m-d\TH:i:s\Z");
    $params["Version"]          = "2009-03-31";

    /* The params need to be sorted by the key, as Amazon does this at
      their end and then generates the hash of the same. If the params
      are not in order then the generated hash will be different thus
      failing the authetication process.
    */
    ksort($params);
    
    $canonicalized_query = array();

    foreach ($params as $param=>$value)
    {
        $param = str_replace("~", "~", rawurlencode($param));
        $value = str_replace("~", "~", rawurlencode($value));
        $canonicalized_query[] = $param."=".$value;
    }
    
    $canonicalized_query = implode("&", $canonicalized_query);

    $string_to_sign = $method."\n".$host."\n".$uri."\n".$canonicalized_query;
    
    /* calculate the signature using HMAC with SHA256 and base64-encoding.
       The 'hash_hmac' function is only available from PHP 5 >= 5.1.2.
    */
    $signature = base64_encode(hash_hmac("sha256", $string_to_sign, $private_key, True));
    
    /* encode the signature for the request */
    $signature = str_replace("~", "~", rawurlencode($signature));
    
    /* create request */
    $request = "http://".$host.$uri."?".$canonicalized_query."&Signature;=".$signature;
        return($request);
       }

Here is the section of code I modified on the module. Lines 102-115

// Only proceed with valid ASIN, access_key_id and associate_tag
        if ($asin != '' && $this->access_key_id != '' && $this->associate_tag != '')
        {

            // Set the values for some of the parameters.
            $params["ItemId"]= $asin;
            $params["Operation"] = "ItemLookup";
            $params["ResponseGroup"] = "Medium";
            $region             = $locale;
            $public_key         = "Access Key ID Goes Here";
            $private_key     = "Secret Access Key Goes Here";
            
            // Define the request
            $request = $this->aws_signed_request($region,$params,$public_key,$private_key);
               
            // Fetch the request and convert to XML

I don’t pass any of the associate info that the module stores in the database to the request to Amazon. I hope this helps. It is not pretty but it is working for now. I am sure I will revisit this later and clean up the code. I want to move the keys out of this file.

Brilliant! Thanks for the bits of code. Actually I am not using the Chris MacPherson module but rather a plugin patched in from earlier plugins. The Chris MacPherson module link seems dead and I don’t have.

Anyway, I am happy with what I have now, so thanks again…. here is a page: http://www.pagetoscreen.net/bookshelf/

Chris