CHANGELOG

v1.0dev16

Note

This is a prerelease version for v1.0.

Date

November 2020

Issues

See here

This update focused on the InboundShipments API, adding some new ways to input and manage data related to FBA shipments while also introducing some comprehensive documentation of the same.

Also includes the Products API’s get_my_fees_estimate method, deprecation warnings for old argument names to smooth the transition from v0.8.

Major changes

  • Products API get_my_fees_estimate method added.

    • See #216 for details.

  • Deprecation warnings for old argument names.

    • Some argument names for certain requests had changed between v0.8 and v1.0dev. This change makes it possible to use the v0.8 argument names in current code.

    • When using an old argument name, the method will raise a deprecation warning, indicating those old argument names will be removed in v1.1. The method will then proceed as expected using the correct arg names.

    • See #222 for details.

  • Datatype models added for InboundShipments.

    • All models for this API can be found in module mws.models.inbound_shipments.

    • Added datatype models for Address, PrepDetails <mws.InboundShipments.PrepDetails, InboundShipmentPlanRequestItem <mws.InboundShipments.InboundShipmentPlanRequestItem, and InboundShipmentItem <mws.InboundShipments.InboundShipmentItem. These models can be used in relevant arguments for request methods related to FBA shipment creation and updating (create_inbound_shipment_plan, create_inbound_shipment, and update_inbound_shipment.

      • With this addition, it is now possible to include PrepDetails for items being added to shipments. This was not possible using the now-“legacy” item dictionary method (though it is still possible using the lower-level generic requests).

    • Added shipment_items_from_plan helper method.

      • The method can process the contents of a shipment plan from the parsed response from create_inbound_shipment_plan, turning the returned items into a set of InboundShipmentItem models automatically.

  • New documentation for Managing FBA Shipments added.

Minor changes

  • Links to Amazon MWS documentation throughout the code base updated from http:// to https://.

  • Type annotations added to request methods for InboundShipments API. - As part of this, certain assert-style checks for argument types have been removed.

  • Tests for InboundShipments request methods overhauled, removing dependency on unittest in favor of pytest.

  • URL naming improvements for documentation pages, and proper usage of doc links instead of adding extraneous anchor links. - Some bookmarks may break with this change, apologies!

  • Dev update callout removed from project README.

  • Development tooling configurations moved into setup.cfg for consistency.

  • Project test suite expanded to Python 3.9 and Ubuntu-20.04 - All automated testing is already performed in a matrix strategy, across Python 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9; and on OSes Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu-18, and Ubuntu-20. Every combination of all these versions and OSes is tested.

v1.0dev15

Note

This is a prerelease version for v1.0.

Date

September 2020

This update represents a major step towards a v1.0 release candidate. Much of the core components of the project have been restructured, new XML parsing logic has been added, and API code has been streamlined to ease development efforts going forward.

Major changes

  • Added dependency xmltodict for parsing XML documents to Python dict objects.

  • Added MWSResponse, intended to replace DictWrapper and DataWrapper response wrappers; and DotDict, intended to replace ObjectDict.

    • These features are in preview mode. See 1 .

  • Added MWS.generic_request(), a low-level interface for sending requests to any MWS operation with any set of parameters necessary (using new utility function, mws.utils.params.flat_dict_param).

  • Several objects have been moved, renamed, and/or retooled to improve code structuring and interoperability, most notably mws.utils (which has been broken down to multiple modules with different concerns).

Code restructuring

Several objects have been moved and/or renamed, with new modules added to contain them. At the same time, the namespace for most of those objects has been left mostly intact. Following changes relate to objects whose imports may need to be adjusted in application code.

  • mws.utils, formerly a single module file, is now a directory containing other modules with separated concerns.

  • Moved mws.mws.DictWrapper to mws.utils.DictWrapper.

  • Moved mws.mws.DataWrapper to mws.utils.DataWrapper.

  • Moved mws.mws.ObjectDict to mws.utils.ObjectDict.

  • Moved mws.mws.XML2Dict to mws.utils.XML2Dict.

  • Moved/renamed mws.mws.clean_params to mws.utils.clean_params_dict.

    • “Cleaning” logic has been broken down further with mws.utils.params.clean_value, which passes to other “clean_FOO” methods such as clean_string, clean_bool, and clean_date.

  • Changed mws.utils.get_utc_timestamp to mws.utils.mws_utc_now.

    • get_utc_timestamp returned an ISO-8601-formatted string of the current datetime in UTC timezone. mws_utc_now produces the same datetime, but instead returns a datetime.datetime object. An ISO-8601 formatted string can easily be obtained using the .isoformat() method.

  • Changed mws.mws.remove_namespace to mws.utils.remove_xml_namespaces.

    • The new version works the same as the old, but can now accept bytes as well as strings.

Deprecations

The following have been deprecated:

  • DictWrapper (removed in v1.1), replaced by MWSResponse in v1.0 (currently in preview mode).

  • DataWrapper (removed in v1.1), replaced by MWSResponse in v1.0 (currently in preview mode).

  • ObjectDict (removed in v1.1), replaced by DotDict in v1.0 (currently in preview mode).

  • XML2Dict (removed in v1.1). XML parsing into Python objects will be performed by the xmltodict library starting in v1.0.

  • MWS.enumerate_param (removed in v1.0). Use utility methods found in mws.utils.params, instead.

Minor changes

  • New arguments are available when instantiating an API class (subclasses of the MWS main class, such as Feeds and Orders):

    • Argument and class attr user_agent_str sets the User Agent String sent with requests to MWS. This can be used to override PAM’s default agent string, "python-amazon-mws/{version} (Language=Python)".

    • Argument headers and attribute extra_headers accepts a dictionary with headers to add to each request, if necessary. Headers can still be altered per-request by passing an extra_headers kwarg to make_request or generic_request.

    • Argument and class attr force_response_encoding allows specifying the encoding used to decode a response’s bytes content, when parsed by MWSResponse into a DotDict.

      • Amazon documentation states they use ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin-1) encoding. However, some responses may still be encoded differently, such as in UTF-8, even if this behaviour is not well-documented. By default, python-amazon-mws relies on requests.Response.apparent_encoding to guess the character set to decode, which should be sufficient for most uses.

      • Setting force_response_encoding='utf-8', for example, will force responses to be decoded as UTF-8 automatically for any request made with that API class instance.

      • Encoding can also be adjusted on the MWSResponse object, by assigning response.encoding = 'utf-8' and then calling response.parse_response() to re-parse content.

  • All request methods are now required to pass the Action name of an MWS operation as the first argument to MWS.make_request or MWS.generic_request. Previously, this was expected as a parameter in the data sent with a request.

  • MWS.make_request argument extra_data has been renamed to params, and can now default to None. This permits operations such as GetServiceStatus, which require no parameters, to pass without issue.

  • The timeout kwarg in MWS.make_request has been promoted to a named argument, with a default value of 300 seconds.

Footnotes

1

1.0dev15 features preview: Prior to v1.0, DictWrapper and DataWrapper will still be used as default response wrappers for all requests; and the .parsed interface for these objects will continue to be ObjectDict instances.

To use MWSResponse and DotDict for response parsing in development versions (1.0dev15 and up), you must enable the _use_feature_mwsresponse feature flag:

  1. Instantiate an API class, i.e. feeds_api = Feeds(...).

  2. Set flag _use_feature_mwsresponse to True on the class instance: feeds_api._use_feature_mwsresponse = True.

Now all requests made through this class instance will return responses as MWSResponse.