Question

This is really strange behavior. When I try make a search using findItemsAdvanced to get items inside Books category (with number 267) using the following XML:

<findItemsAdvancedRequest xmlns="http://www.ebay.com/marketplace/search/v1/services">
<categoryId>267</categoryId>
<descriptionSearch>true</descriptionSearch>
<paginationInput><entriesPerPage>100</entriesPerPage><pageNumber>1</pageNumber></paginationInput>
<sortOrder>BestMatch</sortOrder>
</findItemsAdvancedRequest>

I get a result response of 0 items. But if I JUST change the category number to other category Textbooks Education (category number 2228) for example:

<findItemsAdvancedRequest xmlns="http://www.ebay.com/marketplace/search/v1/services">
<categoryId>2228</categoryId>
<descriptionSearch>true</descriptionSearch>
<paginationInput><entriesPerPage>100</entriesPerPage><pageNumber>1</pageNumber></paginationInput>
<sortOrder>BestMatch</sortOrder>
</findItemsAdvancedRequest>

All is fine and I get a response search result with 100 items.
What is the cause of this? Have Books category any specifics that I’m missing?

Can anybody test to see if the this rare behaviour is not exclusive to my app?

Answer 1

Removing true solve the problem. I really don’t know yet why the API call works for some categories and doesn’t works for others, but one can read at http://developer.ebay.com/devzone/finding/callref/findItemsAdvanced.html#Request.descriptionSearch an explanation of that request xml tag, and truly, it isn’t related with the category search.

Credits of the answer to Eswara Rajesh.