Explain sandbox reporting?

[Rob]

Hi,

I'm trying to develop an app and am having very little luck with
reporting, from what I've seen no matter what report I call I get the
following url

https://sandbox.google.com/sandboxreports/defined.xml

Which of course has generic data.

So am I right or am I missing some detail and If this is the way the
sandbox is there a place where I can see what the reports are supposed
to look like?

Google! your sandbox sucks, its completely inappropriate for
development, a proper sandbox should emulate the production enviroment
almost exactly.

Is there a reason why we pay for this service and have a terrible dev
enviroment? Really I'm just frustrated there must be some reasonable
answer?

Thanks

Rob

[Jan Piotrowski (AdWords API Guru)]

I don't pay for the dev environment. Do you? ;)

- Jan

[Rob]

That was less than helpful and if it saves me API units to do all of
my dev on a good dev enviroment then yes it is important.

Rob

On Jan 20, 6:08 pm, "Jan Piotrowski (AdWords API Guru)"

[timprepscius]

Since you are new here, and seem to be expecting things to be of
"amazing google" quality... (as what I expected myself)

Don't hold your breath.

Google's adwords api is ridden with bugs, both as in, "things don't
work", and "things are incorrectly specified."
Google's quality control doesn't seem to apply to the adwords api.

I would strongly suggest that, before implementing any function of
your own adwords connector, you search in this forum for "bug",
"doesn't work", "screwed up", "wtf" with regard to that feature..
This will save you many many hours..

There is another way to talk to adwords. Besides this api. I,
myself, have not done it, as I'm sure there would be legal
implications for those whom I work for. Is anyone using the private
api succesfully?

-tim

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello Rob,

The Sandbox, as you point out, does not provide any actual report
data. The ReportService in the Sandbox is hopefully useful for when
developing or testing code to schedule and download reports.

When it comes to report processing, I'd recommend that you develop
and test against a report or set of reports specific to your accounts.
The easiest, and free, way to generate such reports is to use the
AdWords web interface to set up a report with the same options of your
choosing, and then download the XML of version of that report from the
web interface. Everything other than Structure reports should be
available via the web interface. You could of course generate the
reports that you'd test your processing code against via the
Production ReportService, but that obviously incurs a charge of 500
API units.

Once you have a set of reports that contain all the columns that
you'd like and some actual statistics relevant to your account, just
reference one of the reports locally during your development or
testing process when it comes time to parse your report.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team

On Jan 21, 9:27 am, Rob <Rob...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Rob]

Thank you, I really appreciate an answer. What kind of time frame am
I looking at for report generation?

Thanks

Rob

On Jan 22, 10:44 am, AdWords API Advisor

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello Rob,

Could you clarify? I'm not sure what time frame you're asking about.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team

[Rob]

Sorry, When I create a report through the api, can I access the data
instantly? or must I wait a certain amount of time? I ask because of
the download link option in report generation.

If I have to wait for a report generation what time frame are we
talking seconds, minutes, hours etc?

Thanks

On Jan 26, 5:49 pm, AdWords API Advisor <adwordsapiadvi...@google.com>

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello Rob,

The actual amount of time that it will take varies depending on the
date range, the size of your accounts, and the exact aggregation
types. Some reports can complete in under a minute, and I'd think that
the majority would complete i under 5 minutes or so, though I have
heard of reports that legitimately take over an hour. When you
schedule a report using the API you end up polling for the status and
waiting for it to complete, and a reasonable poll interval is around
30 seconds or a minute.

It should take the same amount of time for a report to complete
regardless of whether you initiate the process via the API's
scheduleReportJob() or whether you schedule a report with the same
options using the AdWords web interface. If you're curious and want to
get a feel for how long the reports your interested in will take to
run, I'd recommend experimenting with the AdWords web interface so
that you do not incur any API charges.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team