Basic usage

In order to use this API you’ll obviously need an Amazon Associates Web Service account for which you must register with Amazon. Each account contains an AWSAccessKeyId and a SecretKey.

Here is an example how to use the API to search for books of a certain publisher:

AWS_KEY = '...'
SECRET_KEY = '...'

api = API(AWS_KEY, SECRET_KEY, 'us')
node = api.item_search('Books', Publisher='Galileo Press')

The node object returned is a lxml.objectified element. All its attributes can be accessed the pythonic way:

# .pyval will convert the node content into int here
total_results = node.Items.TotalResults.pyval
total_pages = node.Items.TotalPages.pyval

# get all books from result set and
# print author and title
for book in node.Items.Item:
    print '%s: "%s"' % (book.ItemAttributes.Author,
                        book.ItemAttributes.Title)

Please refer to the lxml.objectify documentation for more details.

Error handling

All anticipated errors are caught and raised with meaningful error messages.

try:
    node = api.similarity_lookup('0451462009', '0718155157')
    # ...
except NoSimilarityForASIN, e:
    print 'There is no book similar to %s!' % e.args[0]

The most basic error is AWSError, which has attributes code and message. Almost all operations raise specialies exceptions. Below is a short list:

• InvalidSearchIndex
• InvalidResponseGroup
• InvalidParameterValue
• InvalidListType
• NoSimilarityForASIN
• NoExactMatchesFound
• TooManyRequests
• NotEnoughParameters
• InvalidParameterCombination