How to “Get recent changes”

[jellegaa]

I have noticed that the AdWords Editor has a quite fast feature called
“Get recent changes (basic)”. I am guessing that the AdWords Editor
uses the API. So how is this feature accomplished?

[jellegaa]

Actually, to be more precise: How does one figure out that no changes
have been made, as the Editor is able to do in 1 or 2 seconds?

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello,

Unfortunately, there is no single AdWords API call that you can make
to retrieve this information. The best way to accomplish something
similar is to establish and periodically update a local copy of your
AdWords account data, and query that local data to determine what's
recently changed.

You can accomplish this in a number of ways using AdWords API reports
or the getAll*() methods. If you'd rather not implement everything
yourself, there's the AdWords API Local Database Sync open source
project that should work with minimal configuration:

http://code.google.com/p/awapi-local-db-sync/

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team

[jellegaa]

Thanks

I have already made a bunch of code for managing a local copy, and I
just need to find a quick and low cost way to investigate if any
changes have been made to the account, e.g. querying date and time of
last change.
Sure I could iterate through all objects, but this gives me a fairly
large api access cost, and it may last 10 seconds or more (depending
on account size). When I use the Editor, it seems to be able to tell
me that no changes have been made in 1 sec or so. Does it really run
through all objects within that time?

/Jesper

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello Jesper,

If you already have a local copy of your account structure then you
should be able to use that to determine what changes were made to your
account recently. You just need to make sure that you keep some
historical values for the objects around in addition to the most
recent copy. If you take a look at the code referenced above you can
see an example of how I implemented a system like that, including the
SQL queries used to retrieve information about what's changed in an
account.

The functionality you mention in the AdWords Editor is not available
for use in the AdWords API, unfortunately, so an approach like the one
mentioned above is your best bet for now.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team

[jellegaa]

Thaks again.

There's my answer! Feature not avaliable in the API. So I'll just
stick to my exsisting iterating and checkking code - regardsless it
beeing slow and expensive.

So now, there is one for your API wish-list:

AccountService.getDateAndTimeOfLastUpdate(...)
and/or
CampaignService.getDateAndTimeOfLastUpdate(...)

Rgds
Jesper