Get Access to the Entire Best Buy product catalog with New Tiggzi Plug-in and Sample App

Posted: January 4th, 2013 | Author: max | Filed under: API, Plugin | Tags: API, Plugin | No Comments »

Best Buy Products API and Sample App plug-in provides a simple, REST-based interface for entire product catalog - past and present. This includes pricing, availability, specifications, descriptions, and images for over a million current and historical products.

Adding the plug-in to your app

To add the Best Buy Products API and Sample App plug-in, from Tiggzi builder, select Create New > From Plug-in. Open Shopping, then select Best Buy Product API:

Click Import selected plug-ins. The plug-in will be imported and you will see all its files in the Project view:

Before you run the app, we need to enter the Best Buy API key. Open Services/BestBuy_Settings file and enter your API key:

If you don’t have an API key, get it from Best Buy.

Running the sample app

You can now launch the app by clicking the Test button (in the upper right corner). If a blank page opens up, go to Project/App settings and set the Start Page to BestBuy_StartScreen.

The starting page of app contains the main menu bar at the bottom of the page and the navigation elements to the catalog of products as shown below:

The plug-in allows you to access the categories list to make the search of products easier. Each category contains search attributes for each product type (only music search is supported in current version). Here is an example performing search via Product Categories:

Click on the Products button on the Home page. The list of categories is displayed on the Products page:

Click on the Music button. The search attributes for music products are displayed on the page:

• Album label (text field)
• Album title (text field)
• Artist name (text field)

Genre (drop-down) contains four options:

• Jazz
• Pop
• Rock
• All genres

Parental Advisory (check box)

All the attributes are optional.

Enter any search criteria (e.g. Artist name: Queens Of The Stone Age) and click on the Search button:

The results are displayed on the Catalog page. This page also contains the Keyword filter field and the sorting radio-buttons. By default the results are sorted by Name in ascending order:

To filter your results use the Keyword field. Type in the Keyword field ‘Vulgaris’ and click on the Go button. To erase the field use the Cancel button as shown below:

Click on the Era Vulgaris item to get the product details. The page renders the image preview to the item and the available attributes as shown below:

Click on the Back button in the upper left corner to navigate back through all the described steps.

You can use the Main Menu bar to navigate quickly to the Home Page or/and the Products page.

On the Home page, click on the Search Products button. This performs the defaults search without any search attributes. When invoked – all the available item are displayed in the list. If no required items found – ‘No results found’ message renders.

REST API services used in the plug-in

Now that we’ve seen how this sample app works, let’s dig deeper to see how the Best Buy Products API is exposed in Tiggzi platform.

The following REST services are used for getting information from Best Buy Products API:

BestBuy_GetProductsService service is used for getting the list of required products. REST service Settings display the URL, and other settings:

The {searchQuery} will be set when the app is running, based on user input.

Request tab shows the request parameters defined in the service:

Response parameters are automatically created after doing a service test (in Test tab):

 

Response parameter:

All other services are set in the same way.

Once a service is added to the page, it is then mapped to the page (request and response):

 

 

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