Interest in web tool to generate custom "dummy" reports?

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hey Folks,

One of the things that we've heard a lot of feedback about is the
Sandbox's ReportService, and the fact that the "dummy" report returned
from the Sandbox is not particularly useful. I've also mentioned that
I'm going to try to do something to make more useful information
available. Unfortunately, we're not in a position to make
modifications to the Sandbox's ReportService at this time to have it
return more realistic dummy data.

I've been thinking about different ways to allow developers to get
access to a wider range of sample reports against which they can then
test their code. One of the things I've been suggesting for a while is
that developers run an AdWords report in the Production environment
(via the API or the web interface) against their Production account
and use that resulting report XML data when testing their code. This
solution would work for developers who already have access to a real
AdWords account that receives traffic, but it doesn't work that well
for developers who are just starting out with AdWords and don't have
any Production traffic yet.

Another approach would be to compile a dozen or so sample reports and
post them somewhere for folks to download, but there are millions of
possible report type, aggregation, and column combinations, without
even getting into date ranges. It would be hard to come up with a
representative set of reports that would make everyone happy.

So what I was thinking of doing is writing a fairly simple web
application that would allow developers to specify a report type,
aggregation type, selected columns, date range, and the number of
campaigns/ad groups/keywords they'd like to simulate, and then output
report XML with random data that matches the format specified. It
would be roughly equivalent to the AdWords web interface's Report
Center scheduling options, without any real data being used. The idea
would be to use it a few times to generate reports with exactly the
types of columns and date ranges that you're interested in, and then
to use the resulting report XML to test your report parsing code.

I wanted to gauge whether there would be interest in such a web
application before I sat down and started work on it, so your feedback
is encouraged.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team

[acbc...@gmail.com]

Hi Jeff,
Your idea of a sample report application is exactly what I was hoping
would be available to test reporting.
For now I will take your suggestion in creating a report from our
Production campaign and use the XML as a test.

What our company is proposing is to have our clients log into our
website and run reports (through the API) against the campaigns that
we are administering for them.
The reports would be pretty standard and we wouldn't allow much filter
selection.
From my understanding, the reports get generated and sent to a URL. I
would then have to navigate to that URL to get the XML and parse it.
We want to display the output in a grid (we use Telerik) so I would
need to parse the XML into a database and have the grid bound to the
data in the database.
Is that pretty much the only way to accomplish displaying a report
through the API into a grid?

Thanks
Tom

On Feb 25, 3:25 pm, AdWords API Advisor <adwordsapiadvi...@google.com>
wrote:

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello Tom,

The general process of scheduling and downloading a report as you
describe it is correct. Once the report is finished you can retrieve
the URL of a XML file (optionally gzip-ed) and use the relevant HTTP
client code in the language of your choice to retrieve the report
contents. At that point, it's up to you as to what to do with the
data--it's really a generic problem of how to best display XML data in
a web interface, and there's no single correct approach. Parsing and
then reading it from a database, using XSLT, or just parsing and
displaying it directly from your CGI/Servlet/ASPX code are all
possibilities.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team

[GS]

Hi there.

> > > Another approach would be to compile a dozen or so sample reports and
> > > post them somewhere for folks to download, but there are millions of
> > > possible report type, aggregation, and column combinations, without
> > > even getting into date ranges. It would be hard to come up with a
> > > representative set of reports that would make everyone happy.

I think this is the best way to resolve this problem in a first time.
And not a dozen, just 1 or 2 files would be ok.

Another solution could be publishing of DTD or schema of this XML
file. I can generate report's myself if I know how this file should be
done.
For example <rows></rows> element. What elements should it contain?
<rows>
<column name="name">value</column>
...
</rows>

or maybe
<rows>
<column name="name" value="value"/>
...
</rows>

or:
<rows>
<column>
<name>name</name>
<value>value</value>
</column>
...
</rows>

Maybe there are lots of other elements not only <columns> and <rows>.

If this information is provided by any doc file I'm sorry for my
inattention.

-----------
Some keywords, so ppl could find this thread via search:
defined.xml.gz custom.xml report sandbox

Best regards to everyone.

On 13 апр, 23:53, AdWords API Advisor <adwordsapiadvi...@google.com>