Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations derfloh on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
VFP and Google Adwords Keyword Data
- Thread starter intrench
- Start date
Mike Lewis
Programmer
Stephen, you'll need to give us a lot more details about what you are trying to achieve - and especially what the "Google keyword data" is that you are referring to.
Whatever your aims, the chances are that you will be able to achieve them with Visual FoxPro. We'll be glad to give you some help - but you need to be more specific in your question.
Mike
__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)
Visual FoxPro articles, tips, training, consultancy
Whatever your aims, the chances are that you will be able to achieve them with Visual FoxPro. We'll be glad to give you some help - but you need to be more specific in your question.
Mike
__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)
Visual FoxPro articles, tips, training, consultancy
- Thread starter
- #3
Hi Mike, Yes, if you head over to the google external keyword tool and enter a keyword and do a search you will see a list of keyword results returned.
What i'd like to do is produce my own VFP tool that does the same thing. More of an exercise to challenge myself to do it rather than anything else. Have recently covered building a database and a simple form to update the data, so i was thinking that querying online data would be the next step.
There is information on developer api here But not being a programming pro I don't really know how VFP would work with the google api.
Thanks for any advice
Stephen
What i'd like to do is produce my own VFP tool that does the same thing. More of an exercise to challenge myself to do it rather than anything else. Have recently covered building a database and a simple form to update the data, so i was thinking that querying online data would be the next step.
There is information on developer api here But not being a programming pro I don't really know how VFP would work with the google api.
Thanks for any advice
Stephen
Mike Lewis
Programmer
Stephen,
Normally, in a case like this, I would say don't use the API. It's generally easier to programmatically access the web page, and to parse out from there the information you need.
However, I see that in this case the page includes a "Captcha" (one of the gadgets where you have to type in an obscure set of characters to prove that you are a human). This is designed specifically to prevent the page being accessed programmatically. So unless anyone knows a way round that, it looks like you will have to sign up as an AdWord developer to get access to the API.
The site has a tutorial to help you get started, and this gives a couple of examples. But these are in Python and Java. I don't know enough of those languages to help you translate them to VFP, but other people here might.
Finally, I would say that, given your reason for doing this is as a "personal challenge", there must be easier projects you could choose for that - including other keyword generating services.
Mike
__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)
Visual FoxPro articles, tips, training, consultancy
Normally, in a case like this, I would say don't use the API. It's generally easier to programmatically access the web page, and to parse out from there the information you need.
However, I see that in this case the page includes a "Captcha" (one of the gadgets where you have to type in an obscure set of characters to prove that you are a human). This is designed specifically to prevent the page being accessed programmatically. So unless anyone knows a way round that, it looks like you will have to sign up as an AdWord developer to get access to the API.
The site has a tutorial to help you get started, and this gives a couple of examples. But these are in Python and Java. I don't know enough of those languages to help you translate them to VFP, but other people here might.
Finally, I would say that, given your reason for doing this is as a "personal challenge", there must be easier projects you could choose for that - including other keyword generating services.
Mike
__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)
Visual FoxPro articles, tips, training, consultancy
Olaf Doschke
Programmer
Mike,
in general I prefer an API to automating a html page / html form and parse the result page, as an API is intended for progrmmatic usage.
Google has many functionalities and they didn't choose a single API mechanism, it's very individual what service you use. In another recent thread serpico gave a start about using google maps, you might take a look at that.
As your main concernt is remote data access the better match would not be to attach to such APIs or web services, but to a remote database, eg MySQL or SQL Server. This rather is done via the corresponding ODBC or OLEDB driver and a connection string towars a remote database.
What you try to use with adwords is not remote database access, it's a service/functionality on top of a remote database, the API call via a http request to is surely a remote internet based access, but you attach on the level of a server processing requests which in itself does database access, but you don't attach to the remote database directly.
So an API, an application programming interface, does not give you access to a database, it provides methods you can call.
To learn remote database access you could start with a locally installed MS SQL Express and then use cursoradapter or remote views. This is already called remote, as it's not DBFs. The usual meaning of remote, being on a remote computer, typically in the internet and even not in a LAN or WAN or attached to a LAN via a VPN connection is done exactly the same way as to a local SQL Server, it's just the server needs to allow remote connections and the connection process typically does then expect user credentials to authenticate the remote connection. Everything else works like with a local SQL Express or MySQL installation, so you can learn that without any remote database or webservice or api.
It's not wrong to try google adwords or other internet apis, twitter would be another example, but it's not remote database access in the pure meaning of the term.
Bye, Olaf.
Bye, Olaf.
in general I prefer an API to automating a html page / html form and parse the result page, as an API is intended for progrmmatic usage.
Google has many functionalities and they didn't choose a single API mechanism, it's very individual what service you use. In another recent thread serpico gave a start about using google maps, you might take a look at that.
As your main concernt is remote data access the better match would not be to attach to such APIs or web services, but to a remote database, eg MySQL or SQL Server. This rather is done via the corresponding ODBC or OLEDB driver and a connection string towars a remote database.
What you try to use with adwords is not remote database access, it's a service/functionality on top of a remote database, the API call via a http request to is surely a remote internet based access, but you attach on the level of a server processing requests which in itself does database access, but you don't attach to the remote database directly.
So an API, an application programming interface, does not give you access to a database, it provides methods you can call.
To learn remote database access you could start with a locally installed MS SQL Express and then use cursoradapter or remote views. This is already called remote, as it's not DBFs. The usual meaning of remote, being on a remote computer, typically in the internet and even not in a LAN or WAN or attached to a LAN via a VPN connection is done exactly the same way as to a local SQL Server, it's just the server needs to allow remote connections and the connection process typically does then expect user credentials to authenticate the remote connection. Everything else works like with a local SQL Express or MySQL installation, so you can learn that without any remote database or webservice or api.
It's not wrong to try google adwords or other internet apis, twitter would be another example, but it's not remote database access in the pure meaning of the term.
Bye, Olaf.
Bye, Olaf.
- Status
