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ISBN -> bookdata Lookup to fill in a database

Answer 1

A:

What language are you using? You need a program/script to present a form where you can enter the ISBN, which would then get the data from isbndb.com and populate the database. I've used the API a bit, but not for some time, and it's pretty straightforward.

Steve Michel 2010-03-16 15:56:40

I'm fine with many modern languages (though I thing ms-access doesn't support [m]any of them), C,C++, paskall (shudder), java, python, asm, VB6, couple of BASIC dailects.So the language doen't matter to me, i'm prob preferto be using python for easier parsing, but I think i have to use VBA (wich i'm not so familiar with)

Oxinabox 2010-03-16 23:23:32

If you know VB6, then VBA shouldn't be much of a stretch. The big learning curve will be that VBA provides a lot more database-related functionality than plain VB6, and that Access has it's own rich object model that you have to understand in order to get full power from it.

David-W-Fenton 2010-03-17 20:15:19

Answer 2

A:

The ISBNdb.com API looks simple. The following request should retrieve the information you want ... just substitute your access key for "YourKey" and the ISBN for "YourISBN".

https://isbndb.com/api/books.xml?access_key=YourKey&amp;results=texts&amp;index1=isbn&amp;value1=YourISBN

If that does not work for you, please tell us why.

HansUp 2010-03-16 18:34:54

Yes but what does this return?A website i have to parse through?

Oxinabox 2010-03-16 23:24:17

The response is XML which contains information about the single book whose ISBN you submitted.

HansUp 2010-03-17 04:05:41

Answer 3

+2 A:

This is an incomplete answer, but it should get you started (I've not worked with XML data as return).

This code has the basics:

  Dim oHttp As Object

  Set oHttp = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
  oHttp.Open "GET", "https://isbndb.com/api/books.xml?access_key=YourKey&amp;results=texts&amp;index1=isbn&amp;value1=YourISBN", False
  oHttp.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
  oHttp.Send vbNullString
  Debug.Print oHttp.responseText

The response from the web page is in the .responseText property of the XMLHTTP object. How you process that is beyond me. I know that one of the Access newsgroup gurus has published a tutorial on consuming web services from Access, but I can't locate it. This article might have something to do with the issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/285329/en-us

David-W-Fenton 2010-03-17 20:30:38

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ISBN -> bookdata Lookup to fill in a database

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