Product Searching in the Tools

[Tom Leese]

Hi all,

I discovered that most of the product searching facilities in the tools
at the moment are broken because they involve scraping data from the
respective websites and those websites have changed.

It seems sensible to me that using a proper API to do product searching
will make life so much easier and make the tools far simpler to maintain
and hopefully means they won't need changing whenever a website changes.

I found a site called 'Octopart' that seems to offer exactly what we
want: http://octopart.com/api/home

I would just like to know what everyone's thoughts are on switching to
this? The only minor problem I can see is that it means users will have
to generate an API key for themselves and put it in the configuration
file before they can use the tools to perform product searches (storing
the API key in the code would be a mistake).

Tom