Goodreads Developers discussion

Let me guess - you guys did some sort of website releases around Thursday/Friday, right?

My code (which has been working fantastic for months) is now failing for a couple of cases:

(1) Add reviews gives a 404 error when I try to OAUTH post to the review page e.g. http://www.goodreads.com/review/31217...

(2) Users also started reporting on the weekend(verified this myself) that authorization is broken as well. Calling http://www.goodreads.com/oauth/reques... is now giving 401 errors. Again this is code which has worked perfectly well for the last year so the only thing I can point at that has changed is Goodreads :)

Many thanks for an urgent response to this.

Yes, there was a major code push late Thursday.

http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/35...

Going by the Feedback group alone, the staff is going to be doing a lot of bug fixes this coming week.

Thats for sure.

We added this tickets in our queue. We are currently addressing the major issues introduced with the latest big upgrade. Stay tuned.

Cheers

Thanks! I've been getting a lot of response from users as well not being able to connect to Goodreads.

Hi Kiwidude and Jaime,

Add reviews gives a 404 error when I try to OAUTH post to the review page e.g. http://www.goodreads.com/review/31217...

Review Add and Review Update work for me, and I see it working for others. Can you please provide more details for the call(s) that are failing (Add and/or Update), including what HTTP method you're using for each(e.g., 'POST', 'PUT')?

Users also started reporting on the weekend(verified this myself) that authorization is broken as well.

I believe the issue here is the trailing slash; i.e., '/oauth/request_token/' instead of '/oauth/request_token'. Can you please see whether your code works without the trailing slash? I will see about restoring support for when it's present.

Removing the trailing slash did indeed sort out the authorisation, thanks.

As for the review stuff, still broken for me. The sequence is:
- Add book to a shelf, getting the review-id from the response xml
- Call http://www.goodreads.com/review/[revi... using an http PUT with the OAUTH client, in the body info setting: 'shelf', 'book_id','review[rating]','review[read_at]' parameters in the body.
It is that last call which is failing and worked perfectly for months until last week.

You asked whether I am doing an Add or an Update (of the review presumably?). I had found when I originally wrote this code that an "Add" of a review as such wasn't necessary for my purposes. Instead the act of adding a book to a shelf created a review behind the scenes and that the response xml from the add operation gives you the review-id within it.

Perhaps it is that behaviour that has changed? That a review is no longer created when a book is added to a shelf? However I am still getting a review-id back from the post to /shelf/add_to_shelf.xml - but when you put that id into the /review/[review-id].xml it comes back with a 404 error.

The only other difference I can see from the API documentation (no idea if/when that was last changed) is that I pass a book_id parameter in the PUT body which isn't in the documentation. Now it is possible I screwed up, but I don't tend to include parameters unless they are required. I have a vague recollection that when I originally wrote this I found that the call wouldn't work without including book_id, so the documentation is incomplete. I could be wrong about that, but the fact is that at the moment it is irrelevant because of the 404 errors being returned - it wouldn't matter what parameters I tried to pass!

I was able to review a book and removing the trailing slash did fix the authorization problem. Would you be able to provide a fix for that slash support within the week? I am already waiting for a review of my app and prefer not to have to pull it if possible!

Thanks!
Jaime

We'll do our best.

Any updates on the reviews issue?

Jaime wrote: "I was able to review a book and removing the trailing slash did fix the authorization problem. Would you be able to provide a fix for that slash support within the week? I am already waiting for ..."

Jaime,

Sorry, we don't have the root cause identified so we can't promise that we'll provide a fix for slash support within a week.

Thanks for letting me know!

Kiwidude wrote: " I am still getting a review-id back from the post to /shelf/add_to_shelf.xml - but when you put that id into the /review/[review-id].xml it comes back with a 404 error."

Hi Kiwidude,

We inadvertently dropped PUT support for the Review update call, and it will be restored very soon (should be later today).

To add a little clarity, yes: adding a book to a shelf creates a review (and you get back a reviewId). So, adding the review text as a separate step, you're "updating" the blank review.

Apparently the XML coming back from the API calls has changed(?!).

The http://www.goodreads.com/review/list.xml call for example used to return the title of a book inside of a CDATA section. This is no longer the case and breaks code (mine!) that is looking for said CDATA section that is no longer there.

Is anyone else seeing this issue? All of a sudden my application wasn't working and I narrowed it down to the (unannounced?) schema change. A scan of the forums didn't show any radio chatter regarding such.

@Robert - thanks for the update and nice to have it confirmed that it wasn't my fault :). Look forward to that being deployed and I will push the authorisation url workaround to my users when done.