15 lines and you get this
Pretty cool. Is it from BMW API? Main thing is that its been reported their dealer inventory might not be up to date. Is there a link to individual cars on dealer store that can be extracted?
no, but you have vin numbers.
by not up-to-date you mean they donāt have the new ones or they have the sold ones or both?
Found it, @coder8 reported it when they were writing their scripts.
I have VIN numbers, true. If we to marry our results somehow, how would we match my VIN numbers to your records?
If only there were some way to persist the data, in some sort of rows and columns.
VIN number should be the uid here and everything else should be parsed
This is awesome! Can you add loaners to the list returned?
I meant there were no VIN numbers in his initial screenshot. Theyāre there, I see it now.
Not sure Iām following, could you explain please?
Hitting an API for each manufacturer (if any other provide that too) would be preferable to scraping it from web sites in terms of data parsing ease and speed, however, there is still a question on how up to date the data is in those API responses is. Certainly something that can be explored.
Iāve hit a snag with scraping. Looks like there are different versions of same platforms, like Dealer dot com for example. Some versions run bunch of async scripts to populate vehicle data after document is loaded, while other donāt. With old implementation, Iād often grab content that is not fully populated. Iām working on implementing a way to insure all scripts are loaded before grabbing siteās content for parsing, but so far it really slowed down performance and results are inconsistent.
So, before releasing any updates, I want to tackle this problem once and for all, since itās a core prerequisite for reliable and consistent scrapping across various sites. Hopefully in few days Iāll have updates.
I meant to reply to jeisensc but the theory is to come up with your own naming and parse the data from api/site scrapping
are you able to get the version of that platform? Or a lazy solution is to wait for everything to be loaded
looks like bmw api returns new cars only. I assume OPās script will work for loaners.
No, havenāt found reliable way to determine it yet. Unfortunately, this is only solution I see for now. Itās either this or just keeping quick āhit and runā concept of grabbing web site content and missing out on some of the dealerās stock.
I know Volvo site inventory search has links to each individual carās dealer site.
But loaners/demos are not listed on Volvo site, obviously.
Awesome! Adding you in!
I looked (albeit very quickly) into what manufacturers provide inventory APIs for public consumption, and havenāt found anything.
Thanks!
General update:
Iāve decided to hold off on implementing new way of waiting for website to load all its scripts before grabbing content. Itās too slow and unreliable. Performance suffers just too much. Maybe Iāll revisit it later or someone else can look into reliable and fast way of doing it.
For now, I fixed few āundocumented featuresā (lol @HersheySweet), and removed make/model input case sensitivity. Although, for some searches, due to how some sites treat their query strings, model needs to be in proper case for search to work. Seems to depend on make. For example, ātoyota corollaā will work, but search for āvolvo xc40ā will not find anything. Needs to be āvolvo XC40ā. And āacura RDXā. Seems to depend on original modelās case. If its all uppercase, then it needs to entered as such. Will push new updates to Azure shortly.
Also, some model identifiers on dealer sites are setup to be multi-words. āchevrolet silveradoā will not work, but āchevrolet silverado 1500ā will. If youāre not finding anything for a make that is listed in the āMakeā list, go to dealer website run manual search there and see how model is listed/spelled on UI. Then use same exact spelling for search.
Iām planning to be adding more dealers now, and for next usable feature, Iāve been thinking to group all dealers regionally and allow search by regions, as well as search-all, if user chooses so. Shouldāt be too complicated. What would be your next most useful feature?
That is so cool! Thank you!
Always happy to contribute to community!
Specifically for Volvo loaners, there is a low resolution image that is included on most to all of the listings. I would be happy to help add this, but having a separate category designating loaner based on the presence or absence of the image would probably be helpful for the people targeting discounts of 20% or higher .
(here it is)
Yup, thatās a must feature. Will look into it next