Important changes to Price2Spy API – Price2Spy is growing, both in numbers, and it’s datatypes!

New Price2Spy features, Price2Spy announcements 8.9.2021. Reading Time: 2 minutes

Do you know how big 2^32 is? With a bit of math, we get to 4 294 967 296 – or in everyday language 4Gig, or 4G Price2Spy is soon going to reach 4G of price changes it ever detected.

There are several reasons for this:

  • The number of Price2Spy clients has been growing
  • The number of SKUs and competitor URLs has been growing as well
  • Pricing on the market has been getting more and more dynamic – meaning more frequent price changes

However, such big numbers come with one important technical consequence – we need to prepare Price2Spy for the future, for yet more clients and yet more price changes.
This means that we mean to expand the capacity of 2^32 – up to 2^64 – I won’t try to spell out this number in plain English.

This change in the Price2Spy database has already been done – and now it’s time to apply it in our API.

price2spy api


This is why we have prepared Price2Spy API 2.11

What does it mean for you?

  • If you’re using Price2Spy via REST
    • You would need to update your Price2Spy API client (it’s code) so it uses data types of higher capacity – please see below which fields are affected
  • If you’re using Price2Spy via SOAP
    • If you’re using Microsoft technology to work with WSDL
      • You would need to update your API client so it uses WSDL 2.11
      • You would need to check data types for the 4 fields below in your code
    • If you’re using a non-Microsoft technology to work with WSDL
      • You would need to check data types for the 4 fields below in your code

What will happen if you do no action?

  • In the beginning – everything will most likely continue to work fine
  • However, at a certain point, when Price2Spy returns a number that is higher than 4 294 967 296, your code might have a problem. We anticipate that this will happen by the end of the year 2021

Now, let’s go to the changes in detail:

  • API login and data structures stay exactly as they were – no need for logical changes in your code
  • However, the data types for the following fields have changed from INT to LONG – and this is what you need to check in your code (both in your API requests and in processing API responses from Price2Spy)
    • ProductID – used in almost all Price2Spy API calls. However, not likely to exceed 4G soon!
    • UrlID – used in almost all Price2Spy API calls. However, not likely to exceed 4G soon!
    • AutomatchUrlID – used by our Automatch clients.. Not likely to exceed 4G soon!

The changes are described in detail in our documentation:

The change described above will be put in place on Oct-10. Please make sure to inspect your code and prepare it for the change, so you can continue using our API with minimum interruption.

In case you have any additional questions, feel free to contact us.

Author

Ana Popovic
Ana Popovic is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Price2Spy. She's a sociologist who found her place in the eCommerce world. As such, her love for writing has led her to discover the beauty of content marketing and given her the opportunity to inform people about eCommerce and pricing topics.