Today’s post, I’m going to get back to code.. about time I would say. I thought it would be cool to talk about a way to populate a local database with Commission Junction products. Then you could display those products on your store front. I like to pre-populate a store and use a local database versus hitting a web service so I can speed the experience for the visitor. Web service calls always have a pause, and CJ’s seemed a little slow.

Things we’re going to use to pull this off. You’ll need to make sure all of these requirements are met.

• PHP
• MySQL
• NuSOAP client (for sending/receiving web service requests) — PHP5 users are spoiled with better functionality, and this will not be required, but you’re on your own for sending/receiving the XML, this tutorial covers PHP4 only. You can download NuSOAP here (http://dietrich.ganx4.com/nusoap/)
• CJ Developer’s web key (http://webservices.cj.com/)

This tutorial will discuss receiving and populating a products database (for example every hour) to maintain a fresh product list from a CJ merchant. When I initially created this I wrote it as a CLI (Command LIne script, where cron was running it every hour). If you plan on using this as a straight up web script, ensure you’ve limited access to it (usually only the web server or your IP only). Another security consideration, this script uses mysql_real_escape_string(), if you’re environment does NOT use SAFE_MODE then you’ll need to add stripslashes() inside of that function.
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