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Conversations API: Retrieve and submit consumer-generated content (CGC), and retrieve your product catalog and statistics about your CGC.

Troubleshooting

The Conversations API lets you programmatically retrieve and submit Bazaarvoice Conversations data for use in your applications. To learn more, go to the Conversations API documentation home page.

Contents

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This page has basic steps to help you to fix some common issues encountered when using the Conversations API. Many issues can be resolved by following the steps below.

General troubleshooting steps

Begin by performing the following steps:

  1. Determine the API request being made
    • You may need to review your application code, refer to your application logs, or monitor the network traffic being generated by your application to see the exact request being made.
  2. Reproduce the issue
    • Now that you have the API request you can reproduce the problem. Use an API troubleshooting tool, like PostMan or Curl, that will allow you to see the request and response.
  3. Look for an error message in the response
    • Many errors will return a descriptive error message in the response body. You can see some examples in the section below, and the Reference Documentation lists specific errors for each content type.
  4. Confirm the request URL is correct
  5. Process of elimination
    • Experiment with your request by removing a section and then making the request again. For example, if you remove a parameter and the request works, you know the error is related to that parameter.

Error-specific troubleshooting tips

This section shows common errors and solutions.

Description

Your application is receiving HTTP 200 responses, but the data you are expecting is not in the response body.

Solution

The Conversations API always returns an HTTP 200 code, even when an error has occurred. If there is an error, we will include it in the body of the response. We do this so that applications using JSONP can access the error.

The body of a response containing an error will include an Errors array following this pattern:

                "Errors": [
                    {
                        "Message": "Pretty text explaining what went wrong",
                        "Code": "ERROR_ID_FOR_USE_IN_YOUR_APP"
                    }
                ],

Description

Your request receives an HTTP 200 code, but the following response body:

                Errors": [
                    {
                        "Message": "The passkey provided is invalid.",
                        "Code": "ERROR_PARAM_INVALID_API_KEY"
                    }
                ],

Solution

Start by looking up your API key in the Bazaarvoice Portal. Then review the possible issues below:

  • You are using a staging key for production, or vice versa. Refer to Getting Started to learn about the supported environments.
  • There is a typo in your key. Confirm you are using the correct value.
  • Your key has not been approved yet. Refer to Key Request Process to learn more.
  • Your key was initially not approved, but may be now and you are getting a cached response. Try changing your request to see if you get a valid response.
  • If you know your key was recently requested or approved, please wait up to 5 minutes to ensure the most of up-to-date key status has propagated throughout our network

Description

Your request receives an HTTP 596 error and the following response body:

<h1>596 Service Not Found</h1>

Solution

Our CDN uses the path segment immediately following the domain to route the request. In the example below the segment dat should be data

http://stg.api.bazaarvoice.com/dat/reviews.json?apiversion=5.4&passkey=kuy3zj9pr3n7i0wxajrzj04xo

Description

You receive the following error:

                "Errors": [
                    {
                        "Message": "Feature is not supported for the client",
                        "Code": "ERROR_UNSUPPORTED"
                    }
                ],

Solution

You requested a valid content type, but it is not enabled for your Bazaarvoice client instance.

http://stg.api.bazaarvoice.com/data/{content_type}.json?apiversion=5.4&passkey=kuy3zj9pr3n7i0wxajrzj04xo

Please contact our support team for assistance with this issue.

You receive the following error:

                "Errors": [
                    {
                        "Message": "404 - Request not found",
                        "Code": "ERROR_NOT_FOUND"
                    }
                ],

Solution

This error occurs because there is a typo in the content type or the format is not exactly json or xml:

Content type

http://stg.api.bazaarvoice.com/data/reviws.json?apiversion=5.4&passkey=kuy3zj9pr3n7i0wxajrzj04xo

Format

http://stg.api.bazaarvoice.com/data/reviews.JSON?apiversion=5.4&passkey=kuy3zj9pr3n7i0wxajrzj04xo

Still having trouble? Contact us for assistance.