D6: Improved token support (especially for Automatic Node Titles)

Thanks for doing this!

If you can actually get tokens to do anything, I'll be much appreciative for you to explain how.

Thanks,
-Randy

Fantastic! Just what the doctor ordered.

When this goes in, it will need to be added to the documentation page, explaining how to use tokens.

A patch can include new files - that's fine.

And if ISBN-13 (EAN) doesn't work in D7 it's a bug. Should work.

The "files =" lines are no longer required in D7's info files except when the file defines a class that should be autoloaded.

Took a look at #3 and it seems fine to me... But it should be in asin.module, not amazon.module, right?

Thanks very much for your patch, and sorry it took me so long to look at it.

Also...

+++ amazon.module	28 Jan 2011 18:37:02 -0000
@@ -849,6 +849,66 @@ function amazon_token_values($type, $obj
+    $tokens['asin']['amazonprice'] = t('Current price offered by Amazon');
+    return $tokens;
+	  ¶
+  } ¶

Whitespace errors - if you wouldn't mind fixing them up too.

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@cristinawithout, thanks for your work on this. I'm a little confused about where we're at. #13 is a 6.x patch?

Could you please update the issue summary (edit the node) and explain the 6.x and 7.x issues and where we should go with them? The Issue summary template may be helpful.

Thanks so much for your help on this. I look forward to getting your work committed.

Related: #1014036: Port token support to D7

Should we just rip out the existing amazon_token_values() and amazon_token_list()? I never was actually able to figure out how to use them for anything useful :-)

Thanks for the issue summary and for keeping me on track where this goes.

What's the status of the issue? I noticed that 6.x-1.3 exposes 'Amazon' tokens, e.g. to the 'Page Title' module, but they can not be used.

Error message when using the tokens [label] and [binding]: Das %element-Title ist mithilfe die folgenden ungültigen Token: [label], [binding]. (localized message, not understandable even in German; the original error message string is probably: The %element-title is using the following invalid tokens: @invalid-tokens.).

Is this an issue of the 'Page Title' module, or does the patch from #13 target problems like this?

Thanks!

@asb did you try #13 ? If so, please let us know what your results are.

@rfay: Actually no as I do not understand what this issue is about. It is labeled as a feature request against the dev release, but the latest stable release of 'Amazon' module already exposes it's tokens. However, these token do not work for me, so it'd be either a bug report against 'Amazon' module regarding existing functionality, or against 'Page title', 'Token', or anything else which causes an incompatibility. Or I don't get the point of this issue ;)

Anyway, I upgraded to the current dev release, ran update.php and tried to apply the patch from #13 without success. Running from within ./sites/all/modules, it can't find file to patch at input line 14 (running as patch or patch -p0). With patch -p1 I get:

# patch -p1 < asin-field-tokens-1043030-13.patch
patching file asin/asin.module
Hunk #1 FAILED at 514.
1 out of 1 hunk FAILED -- saving rejects to file asin/asin.module.rej

Contents of asin/asin.module.rej:

*************** function theme_asin_autocomplete($element) {
*** 514,516 ****
    return theme_asin_text($element);
  }
  
--- 514,572 ----
    return theme_asin_text($element);
  }
  
+ /**
+  * Implementation of hook_token_list()
+  */
+ function asin_token_list($type = 'all') {
+   if ($type == 'field' || $type == 'all') {
+     $tokens = array();
+     $tokens['asin']['asin'] = t("Product ID");
+     $tokens['asin']['title'] = t("Title retrieved from Amazon.com");
+     $tokens['asin']['isbn'] = t("The 10-digit ISBN (INternational Standard Book Number)");
+     $tokens['asin']['ean'] = t("The EAN or 13-digit ISBN");
+     $tokens['asin']['detailpageurl'] = t("The detail page URL for the item");
+     $tokens['asin']['salesrank'] = t("The product's sales rank");
+     $tokens['asin']['brand'] = t("The product's brand");
+     $tokens['asin']['publisher'] = t("The product's publisher");
+     $tokens['asin']['manufacturer'] = t("The product's manufacturer");
+     $tokens['asin']['studio'] = t("The product's studio");
+     $tokens['asin']['label'] = t("The product's label");
+     $tokens['asin']['binding'] = t("The product's binding type");
+     $tokens['asin']['releasedate'] = t("The product's release date");
+     $tokens['asin']['listprice'] = t("The product's list price");
+     $tokens['asin']['producttype'] = t("The product's Amazon product type");
+     $tokens['asin']['lowestprice'] = t("The lowest price currently offered by any merchant at Amazon");
+     $tokens['asin']['amazonprice'] = t("Current price offered by Amazon");
+   }
+ }
+ 
+ /**
+  * Implementation of hook_token_values()
+  */
+ function asin_token_values($type, $object = NULL, $options = array()) {
+   if ($type == 'field') {
+     $item = $object[0];
+     $asin = amazon_convert_to_asin($item['asin']);
+     $amazonArr = amazon_item_lookup($asin);
+     $item = $amazonArr[$asin];
+     $values['asin'] = check_plain($item['asin']);
+     $values['title'] = check_plain($item['title']);
+     $values['isbn'] = check_plain($item['isbn']);
+     $values['ean'] = check_plain($item['ean']);
+     $values['detailpageurl'] = check_url($item['detailpageurl']);
+     $values['salesrank'] = check_plain($item['salesrank']);
+     $values['brand'] = check_plain($item['brand']);
+     $values['publisher'] = check_plain($item['publisher']);
+     $values['manufacturer'] = check_plain($item['manufacturer']);
+     $values['studio'] = check_plain($item['studio']);
+     $values['label'] = check_plain($item['label']);
+     $values['binding'] = check_plain($item['binding']);
+     $values['releasedate'] = check_plain($item['releasedate']);
+     $values['listprice'] = check_plain($item['listpriceformattedprice']);
+     $values['producttype'] = check_plain($item['producttype']);
+     $values['lowestprice'] = check_plain($item['lowestpriceformattedprice']);
+     $values['amazonprice'] = check_plain($item['amazonpriceformattedprice']);
+     return $values;
+   }
+ }
+

Here's cristinawithout's #13 rerolled for current code. I haven't tested it.

We don't use patch -p0 any more since we moved to git. You'll want to do a git apply most of the time; patch -p1 does work, but you're better to move to git.

Git what? Oh I miss the old front page where changes like this were announced...

# git apply amazon.tokens_1043030_21.patch 
amazon.tokens_1043030_21.patch:5: new blank line at EOF.
+
warning: 1 line adds whitespace errors.

Assuming that this warning does not indicate something essential, I'm afraid the patch still doesn't fix the issue with the 'Page Title' tokens (same error as quoted in #18), or there is an incompatibility with 'Page Title'.

Anyway, thanks to both of you for working on this issue!

@asb, I have to assume that you're pulling my leg about having missed the git migration... But anyway there's lots of documentation about how to use git, on every project under the "revision control" tab, and at http://drupal.org/documentation/git. It was like a year's effort, with the migration completing last February.

I am aware that the repositories were migrated from CVS to git, but until now I was not aware that git comes with its own patching mechanism. I believe that, like me, most non developers simply assume that stuff like source control doesn't concern them. At least until we're forced out of the state of denial ;)

To not drift completely into off-topoic smalltalk, I updated 'Amazon' module on another site to the current dev release and applied the patch before running update.php (with "amazon_update_6016 - Increase the length of the mpn field"):

# git apply -v amazon.tokens_1043030_21.patch 
Checking patch asin/asin.module...
Applied patch asin/asin.module cleanly.

However, the tokens still do not work als replacement patterns in 'Page Title', and they're not even exposed to 'Pathauto' (pathauto-6.x-1.5; recommended & supported release, but old & many issues). This applies to an environment with Pressflow 6.22 and token-6.x-1.16.

Any news on this issue?
I'm having the same problem here using Amazon Module 6.x-1.3
Token 6.x-1.16 and Pathauto 6.x-1.5

@cristinawithout Thanks!

Could you please give us a step-by-step testing technique for this?

Do I understand correctly that field tokens in D6 are fairly well established, but that the approach to them in D7 is pretty much not done yet?

@cristinawithout:

Install/enable Amazon 6.x-2.x-dev release...

Is there really such a realease, or do you mean amazon-6.x-1.x-dev?

Regarding the token-enabled modules, it might be relevant as well which version you are (or: we should) use/ing, many of them are seriously broken for years, and some maintain different branches (like 'Pathauto') at the same time.

Regarding the patch from #26: it applies cleanly against amazon-6.x-1.x-dev; I'll check if Tokens are working in Nodewords, Pathauto, and the like, and report back later. Maybe then I even can remember what I originally tried to accomplish with this two weeks ago ;)

And, btw, thanks for the new patch!

This is pretty exciting, so I did a quick look with pathauto 6.x-1.6 and the node pattern "[field_asin-title]"; doesn't work for me, gives an URL alias like ...%5Bfield_asin-title%5D.

Also, the Array (like provided at ./admin/settings/amazon/test) does only partially match the exposed tokens; e.g. the (imho pretty useful) strings from [creator] and [participants] are missing. I'm using Amazon.de, so ASINs from other countries or even other product groups might behave different.

@cristinawithout: Yes, the field's name is actually 'field_asin' (actually there's also another one of field type 'Amazon item', 'field_legacy_asin'). Attaching a screenshot of the exposed tokens for those two 'Amazon item' field types.

Promise: I'll do more tests tomorrow, with the recently updated pathauto 6.x-2.0, nodewords, page title and the like. But I want to have backups of my sites (today I killed a couple of thousand taxonomy term URL aliases because I believed for some irrational reason that bulk alias generation would work in 6.x-2.0 as advertised, but (of course) it didn't, and I didn't make a backup prior to believing ;)

Accidentally set to needs work in #28

@crossover - I was able to successfully use the Amazon field tokens with Pathauto as well with this latest patch.

Please test it for your needs so we can find out whether it works and get the functionality into a release.

After Patching It's woking like a charm
Thanx a Lot Cristina !

OK, drupal.org is back again... there seems to be no amazon-6.x-2.x-dev:

# drush dl amazon-6.x-2.x-dev
Could not locate specified project version, downloading latest stable version...

So this was a typo and we're supposed to be working with amazon-6.x-1.x-dev (please correct me if I'm wrong). I just tried this on another site; environment: Pressflow 6.22.x, Token 6.x-1.17, Token actions enabled (this release of 'Token' might have intrduced a regession, at least it broke some 'Automatic Nodetitles' for me that were working before).

For this example, I'm working with ASIN 3931792048 from Amazon.de.

Full array from ./admin/settings/amazon/test:

Array
(
    [asin] => 3931792048
    [isbn] => 3931792048
    [ean] => 9783931792046
    [salesrank] => 163670
    [detailpageurl] => http://www.amazon.de/Mein-gesunder-Nordischer-Schlittenhund-Anderson/dp/3931792048%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAIQGLIPXGXFGOLL5A%26tag%3Dencycan-21%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D3931792048
    [listpriceamount] => 1290
    [listpricecurrencycode] => EUR
    [listpriceformattedprice] => EUR 12,90
    [lowestpriceamount] => 1280
    [lowestpricecurrencycode] => EUR
    [lowestpriceformattedprice] => EUR 12,80
    [amazonpriceamount] => 1290
    [amazonpricecurrencycode] => EUR
    [amazonpriceformattedprice] => EUR 12,90
    [binding] => Gebundene Ausgabe
    [brand] => Trixie
    [iseligiblefortradein] => 1
    [label] => Bede
    [manufacturer] => Bede
    [numberofpages] => 120
    [productgroup] => Book
    [producttypename] => ABIS_BOOK
    [publicationdate] => 2000-10-06
    [publisher] => Bede
    [sku] => 320674012954999
    [studio] => Bede
    [title] => Mein gesunder Nordischer Schlittenhund
    [author] => Array
        (
            [0] => Peer Anderson
        )

    [participants] => Array
        (
            [0] => Peer Anderson
        )

    [imagesets] => Array
        (
            [smallimage] => Array
                (
                    [url] => http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/319ZHVP4DSL._SL75_.jpg
                    [height] => 75
                    [width] => 56
                )

            [mediumimage] => Array
                (
                    [url] => http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/319ZHVP4DSL._SL160_.jpg
                    [height] => 160
                    [width] => 120
                )

            [largeimage] => Array
                (
                    [url] => http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/319ZHVP4DSL.jpg
                    [height] => 180
                    [width] => 135
                )

        )

    [editorialreviews] => Array
        (
            [0] => Array
                (
                    [source] => Product Description
                    [content] => Das Hundebuch "Mein gesunder Hund". Im Gegensatz zu vielen anderen Rassehundbüchern setzen die Autoren hier den thematischen Schwerpunkt auf Gesundheitsvorsorge, bzw. Vorbeugung und Behandlung rassespezifischer Krankheiten und nicht auf Zuchtziele und -merkmale der jeweiligen Hunderasse. Weitere Inhalte: * Die Auswahl eines Hundes * Artgerechte und sinnvolle Erziehung * Gesunde Ernährung und Nahrungsergänzung * Erste Hilfe Je Titel 120 Seiten und ca. 100 Farbabbildungen
.
                )

        )

    [customerreviews_iframe] => http://www.amazon.de/reviews/iframe?akid=AKIAIQGLIPXGXFGOLL5A&alinkCode=xm2&asin=3931792048&atag=encycan-21&exp=2011-11-04T17%3A12%3A19Z&v=2&sig=HdOASTYUncFCE1lDV9Ifvl%2BSw8YWZqjWKwD%2FHpY4nhI%3D
)

My goal is to get a node title like

Peer Anderson: Mein gesunder Nordischer Schlittenhund (2000)

respectively an URL alias like

../peer_anderson/mein_gesunder_nordischer_schlittenhund/2000

The example node is live at http://encycan.org/node/1386. Please note that this is a "dummy node" which only consists of an ASIN field. The text is automatically generated via Views and the Amazon tokens exposed to Views. These tokens are:

Amazon: ASIN 
Amazon: All participants 
Amazon: Amazon Price (numeric) 
Amazon: Amazon price (formatted) 
Amazon: Aspect ratio 
Amazon: Audience rating 
Amazon: Binding 
Amazon: Customer reviews iframe 
Amazon: Detail page URL 
Amazon: Dewey decimal number 
Amazon: EAN (13-digit ISBN number) 
Amazon: ESRB age rating 
Amazon: Edition 
Amazon: Editorial content 
Amazon: Editorial review source 
Amazon: Genre 
Amazon: Hardware platform 
Amazon: ISBN number (10-digit) 
Amazon: Invalid ASIN 
Amazon: Label 
Amazon: Label 
Amazon: List price (formatted) 
Amazon: List price (numeric) 
Amazon: Lowest price (formatted) 
Amazon: Lowest price (numeric) 
Amazon: Manufacturer 
Amazon: Number of discs 
Amazon: Operating system 
Amazon: Pages 
Amazon: Part number 
Amazon: Participant name 
Amazon: Participant role 
Amazon: Platform 
Amazon: Product group 
Amazon: Product image 
Amazon: Product type name 
Amazon: Publication date 
Amazon: Publisher 
Amazon: Region code 
Amazon: Release date 
Amazon: Running time 
Amazon: Sales rank 
Amazon: Studio 
Amazon: Studio 
Amazon: Theatrical release date 
Amazon: Titel

The return values greatly differ depending on product type, product age, etc., so I worked a lot with field rewriting and the "hide if empty" feature which is broken in the recently released views-6.x-2.14.

However, the number of tokens in Views and tokens in other places greatly differ. The tokens we get for Pathauto and the like are just a very small subset of the array from Amazon API respectively what we get in Views with a relationship on the ASIN field.

a) nodewords-6.x-1.x-dev (please notice that all "stable" releases are broken beyond repair, so nodewords will only work, if at all, with nodewords-6.x-1.x-dev or nodewords-6.x-2.x-dev).

Nodewords does not allow node type specific sources for meta tags, and the current dev release seems not even to support tokens. However, it processes terms in taxonomy vocabularies, so it might be possible to bridge between Amazon tokens and website meta tags if one would get at least some Amazon tokens into taxonomy. Nice idea, but largely outside the scope of this issue.

b) pathauto-6.x-1.6.

Tokens exposed at ./admin/build/path/pathauto:

[field_legacy_asin-amazonprice]
[field_legacy_asin-asin]
[field_legacy_asin-binding]
[field_legacy_asin-brand]
[field_legacy_asin-detailpageurl]
[field_legacy_asin-ean]
[field_legacy_asin-isbn]
[field_legacy_asin-label]
[field_legacy_asin-listprice]
[field_legacy_asin-lowestprice]
[field_legacy_asin-manufacturer]
[field_legacy_asin-producttype]
[field_legacy_asin-publisher]
[field_legacy_asin-releasedate]
[field_legacy_asin-salesrank]
[field_legacy_asin-studio]
[field_legacy_asin-title]

So tokens for [author] and [participants] are missing (that's the one I'd like to use); from [publicationdate] I'd only need the YYYY value, so I can only use [field_legacy_asin-title] in the URL alias, and this works on this site. However, in my use case the node title equals the Amazon "title" token anyway, so I could use the [title-raw] token as well. Tokens for stuff like [author] and [participants] would be a real enhancement, though.

c) auto_nodetitle-6.x-1.2. At ./admin/content/node-type/amazon-node, exactly the same tokens are exposed as in pathauto, so again I'm missing [author], [participants] and the like for my use case. Since 'Automatic Nodetitle' allows to evaluate PHP expressions, someone with proper coding skills might be able to extract the YYYY part from the [field_legacy_asin-releasedate] (obviously doesn't work with a simple str_replace()), but as is I have no use for any of the provided tokens other than [field_legacy_asin-title].

However, the [field_legacy_asin-title] token is properly replaced in the node title field.

d) page-title-6.x-2.5 is more interesting since it makes sense to put additional information in the page title. Again the same tokens are exposed, and to make proper use of [field_legacy_asin-releasedate] I'd need a different date formatting. But I can add the publisher and the (unformatted) ISBN number to the page title:

[page-title] by [field_legacy_asin-publisher] (ISBN [field_legacy_asin-ean]) - Product | [site-name]

It'd be nice to replace "Product" by a more specific product category, but the [productgroup] token isn't exposed (and wouln'd be localized anyway). So I can add [binding]; [field_legacy_asin-producttype] returns no value.

For all those places where tokens are used it is a long standing feature request to allow conditions, especially a "hide if empty" option. This would greatly enhance the potential of tokens with unsure return values (which are characteristic for the data returned by Amazon API). However, this has not been implemented yet so the practical use cases are pretty much limited. The narrower the types of data you are using, the more use you can make of the available tokens (e.g. books only).

The main problems of the current token implementation for the 'Amazon' module are a) there's too much missing, and b) there might be some encoding issues.

Ad b) Example http://encycan.org/node/11172, the page title returns "...Gebundene Ausgabe von Mller Rschlikon..."; the publisher's name actually is "Müller Rüschlikon" (two umlauts). However, the output of the token is consistent with the output at ./admin/settings/amazon/test:

    [label] => Mller Rschlikon
    [manufacturer] => Mller Rschlikon
    [publisher] => Mller Rschlikon
    [studio] => Mller Rschlikon

So probably already Amazon garbled this data and neither a problem of the tokens integration, nor of the 'Amazon' module.

Double encodings in automatically generated node titles are a problem, indeed, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. Those are emitted frequently in automatically generated node titles, and I believe it'd be the task of the 'auto_nodetitle' module to sanitize or at least transliterate this - but it'd be great to get a showcase to prove that it is possible to prevent them.

I like the ability to use tokens from Amazon and I would favour to get this committed. There is some room for enhancement, but this patch is definitely something to build on!

I'm wondering if the data returned from Amazon is different for different product types?

Yes, at least for Amazon.de it definitely is. [author] appears mostly for [productgroup] = book, movies or cds have different properties. Much data is duplicated in [participants]. [ean] is often empty, the "editorial reviews" show up only occasionally. The same goes for [listpriceformattedprice], [amazonpriceformattedprice], and [lowestpriceformattedprice], much of it is empty, especially for older products or stuff from marketplace/33rd party providers. Actually, the data from Amazon is quite a mess and I wouldn't consider it as "structured data" ;)

And, again, thank you for sharing your code!

The additional tokens are exposed to Views only after establishing a Views relationship on the Amazon item field, but it'd be interesting where the data actually comes from if the View is run. If I put an [author] token into a View, does this actually trigger an API call each time?

Release date: I believe, splitting this into three tokens (like [field_asin-releasedate-yyyy], [field_asin-releasedate-mm], [field_asin-releasedate-dd]) would be great. Making it into a full 'Date' field would be even greater, but for sure is out of the scope of this issue as well ;)

Anyway, the tokens are good stuff. Thank you!

@rfay: Do you know anything about the design decision to store a limited number of fields in the database? Maybe there's a reason behind it?

@asb, there are some good benefits of putting it all in db tables. Like the views integration.
But it was that way long before I got here. And it's always been a bit strange IMO.

There are still some things that aren't stored, like EAN and ISBN.

You got me confused again ;) The tokens [field_asin-ean] and [field_asin-isbn] are working for me.

Also I believe that if there's a ISBN-10 it's always := ASIN; an ISBN-13 might be = EAN, but might differ as well. IMO any ISBN-10 can be converted into an ISBN-13 (but of course not every ASIN can be converted into an ISBN).

Will test the new patch later, it sounds like amazing work!

Next try:

# rm -r amazon/
# drush dl amazon-6.x-1.x-dev [...]
# cd amazon/
# wget http://drupal.org/files/amazon-field-tokens-1043030-43.patch [...]
# patch -p1 < amazon-field-tokens-1043030-43.patch 
patching file asin/asin.module

Now, a huge number of tokens are exposed. Many new ones are there, [field_asin-ean] is gone, probably because of the limitations you mentioned in #43. Testing for ASIN 3440097447 from Amazon.de (this is a printed book):

In Pathauto, the pattern

../[field_asin-author]/[field_asin-title]/[field_asin-release-Y]

gives me an URL alias like

../martin_pietralla/clickertraining_fuer_hunde/0

The autor token is working, but not the product's release date as 4 digit year. Same result with Automatic Nodetitle and Page Title, but that's not your code's fault.

(The problem seems to be that the Amazon API returns [publicationdate] => 2003-08-01, but no "release date". Not very nice how hard it Amazon makes to work with their data. In 'auto_nodetitle' I'll try to put some PHP together to not use [field_asin-release-Y] if = 0, in 'pathauto' and 'page_title' it's more problematic to use this token for books.)

More important is that the tokens seems to work consistent between Pathauto, Automatic Nodetitle, and Page Title; also, the recently released token-6.x-1.18 introduces no further regressions. I have checked a couple of other tokens, and all were working as expected, when manually editing the node.

To apply the new tokens on a larger scale, I tried a bulk operation with 'Views Bulk Operations' and the actions "Update URL alias", and "Update automatically generated node title" on ~800 nodes. This worked well, also (important: 'Automatic Nodetitles' has to be set to unconditionally generate the node title, otherways it won't be updated). Observations:

The book title "Reserve hat Ruh...Ein Leben im Rudel" is expanded to "Reserve hat Ruh...Ein Leben im Rudel" with the token [field_asin-title] (Pathauto strips this, if configured to discard "). With [field_asin-title-dec], I'm getting the correct title. It's very thoughtful of you to provide this additional token!

About 10% of the automatically generated node titles are not usable, because of missing author data or other inconsistencies of the Amazon database. So it's definitely a good idea to write some wrapper code to sanitize the data before relying on it too much. But, again, that's a problem of the Amazon data, your code works perfectly.

This patch is really good stuff!

This was easy... the following snippet allows to build sane node titles with 'Automatic Nodetitle'. It conditionally discards the "author: " string if the "author" token is empty and outputs a node title of either "author: title", or just "title".

<?php
  $author = '[field_asin-author]';
  $title = '[field_asin-title-dec]';
  if (empty($author)) {
    return $title;
    }
    else
    {
      return $author . ': ' . $title;
    }
?>

Based on this, one might get more consistent node titles, e.g. on a review site, than with user generated content.

Populating a vocabulary with tokens, or entering tokens into CCK field seems to be a lot more complicated; however, the Amazon token are processed by the 'Rules' module. Attached my approach to grab the "publisher" token and enter it in a predefined vocabulary (rules export).

This Rule takes an ASIN enabled node and enters the contents of the "publisher" token into the vocabulary "Akteur" when the node is being saved. This is just a prove of concept; to make this useful, this definitely needs some work, e.g. the rule should check if the term already exists; also, I have not tested what would happen if the node is already tagged with the presumably "new" taxonomy term.

On different sites, I'm using vocabularies for the publishing/release date, the publisher/label/studio, composer, director, and actor. In theory, those could be populated with similar rules and the new Amazon tokens - if this approach proves feasible:

• release date (movies, cds, maybe books) -> [releasedate]
• publisher/label/studio -> [publisher], [studio], [manufacturer], [label]
• director -> [director]
• actor -> [actor]
• composer -> [creator] (?)

Probably CCK fields can be populated in a similar fashion. For that I could use [runningtime], [audiencerating], [releasedate], [numberofpages], [binding], and [edition] - all stuff so far the users have to enter manually (or not enter at all ;) I haven't checked the intersections between the Amazon API array and the new tokens, but I'm pretty sure that they might save a lot of typing.

...that to answer the question if there are use cases for Amazon tokens ;)

Update: This approach works, at least partially. To check in a Rule if a taxonomy terms already exists, a patch is required (#490898: Condition: does term exist?, #40). That patch works for me, but has not yet been committed to the Rules dev release. Also, the way Rules is processing the logic, a node will only be tagged with a new term; a second rule would be required to tag nodes with an existing term, but it couldn't prevent duplicates.

I had no success with dates at all. As with other import tools, it is virtually impossible to get a proper date into a CCK date field without manually typing it in; there seem to be a lot of hidden valiations which cause dates to be either rejected, or falsified. Example for [releasedate]: Trying to enter data in a date field with formatting/granularity d.m.Y (like "13.03.2012"). The token [field_asin-release] is supposed to return a ISO formatting (Y-m-d, like "2012-03-15"), so I have to concatenate the parts in the right order; Rules expects an array, so I tried:

return array(
  0 => array('value' => '[node:field_asin-release-d].' . '[node:field_asin-release-m].' . '[node:field_asin-release-Y]')
);

If I print this in a message, I get the proper "15.03.2012"; the CCK date field receives: "01.01.2011". When I print the token [field_asin-release] in a message, I get: "[field_asin-release]".

Btw, at least Amazon.de seems to never return any [releasedate] for printed books, it's always "publishing date" (which we don't get in the new tokens). The data stored in the row "publicationdate" of the table amazon_book is a mess (a mixture of complete (like "2001-12-01") and incomplete (like "1996") dates.

For movies, there are no other tokens I could use. [field_asin-participants] returns an unsorted mixture of director(s) and actor(s). Amazon API has [actor] and [director], but those are not exposed as tokens.

The database table amazon_item_participant contains data like this:

| asin       | type     | participant
| 3453194381 | author   | Arthur C. Clarke
| B001AKTZSM | creator  | Mark Snow
| B000051WDE | creator  | Alan Menken
| B000051WDE | director | Eric Goldberg
| B000051WDE | director | Mike Gabriel 
| B0000AOD3Y | creator  | Ron Grainer
| 3426628074 | creator  | Frauke Czwikla
| B00004L8J5 | director | Wolfgang Reitherman
...

This probably would have to be preprocessed to populate a "director" or "actor" token, which again is outside the scope of this issue, I believe.

On the positive side: the new Amazon tokens work more or less with Rules. On the other hand, 'Rules' seems to be much to inflexible to populate a vocabulary or a CCK field with sane values from Amaton tokens. For that, I'm back to manually copying & pasting.

I really appreciate the work and testing on this and I'll try to review and commit this week or at least soon.

Committed and included in new 6.x-1.4 release.

http://drupalcode.org/project/amazon.git/commitdiff/dd97af3

Thanks so much for the great patch and for the great reviews

Looking forward to 7.x support :-)

Fix typo