Comments on: VIN API – PHP and XML Parsing

By: charlie

charlie — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 00:41:18 +0000

In reply to thas. thas - You get an api key from vinapi.skizmo.com here - http://vinapi.skizmo.com/signup. When you sign up, you'll get an api key good for 20 VIN decodings. After that, you pick from the packages available here - http://vinapi.skizmo.com/packages_and_pricing.

By: thas

thas — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 06:34:47 +0000

how to get api key ?

By: charlie

charlie — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 00:09:49 +0000

Hey Jacob – worked a bit over the weekend, found a couple places that were of issue and refactored them. Thanks for the update and thanks again for the help troubleshooting.

By: just J

just J — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 22:03:42 +0000

Hey,

Not sure what you changed, but thanks! I ran 5 and they all came back with full datasets, ran 5 more and they all came back good. I then tried 10 and 100% full datasets. I logged into my account to see how many remaining credits I had and noticed you bumped it up (thanks for that) so I ran 75 VINs at once and guess what? That’s right, 100% full datasets! I’m very pleased and now writing a class to parse the info that I need from it. Just made my day! It was pretty quick, too. I ran each VIN single threaded and it was finished in under 2 minutes.

Regards,
Jacob

By: just J

just J — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 18:13:52 +0000

I tried the 10 and 1 came back with a full dataset, 1 was invalid check-sum (guessing the dealer input the vin wrong) and the rest were all short datasets.

I want to get at least 50% working, that way I can charge dealers per full dataset only and still come out with a little profit.

Now this is weird… I just ran the same 10 VINs again and 6 of 10 (minus one for invalid VIN) came back with a full dataset. Not sure if you are updating one database with another on the fly or using JOIN but something isn’t working right on your end.

By: charlie

charlie — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 14:02:28 +0000

In reply to just J.

Hey Jacob – I credited you with 200 VIN requests. So please verify and make sure I have the right Jacob 🙂 You can do the equivalent of VinApi.get(“account_information”) to check.
Strangely enough, those VINs all work for me (again, not saying much). I’ve added a ton more loggers and we’ll get to the bottom of this. It has to do with our caching of data sets, for which I’ve fixed a few areas of overlap.
Initially, everything was just the “basic” data set and we have some stubborn VINs in there that we’ve been washing out.
Thanks again for the help.

By: just J

just J — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 03:08:39 +0000

Hey,

I tried a few of them and they worked. I then went to my database and pulled out a small list to check and only the last one I tried worked. Now, I get the “out of credits” error. I don’t want to buy credits until I know your service will work for me. Below is the list of the new list I tried.

2G1WC5EM2B1192127
1D4RD4GGXBC698496
2G1WG5EK2B1210242
1G6DW6ED3B0160975
3GNBABFW5BS547555
JHMGE8H48AS000967
5FNRL5H47BB015649
1FTRW07L43KD01241 – worked.

By: charlie

charlie — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 02:55:18 +0000

Jacob – let’s see how these changes hold up – let me know how it goes.

By: charlie

charlie — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:44:53 +0000

Thanks for the test VINs Jacob – I’ll see what we can figure out and get back to you asap.

By: just J

just J — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 05:12:45 +0000

Hey,

Thanks for the quick reply. I tried the same VIN you have and it was a full dataset, so I know it isn’t my code. I tried the below VINs from my database, which are current vehicles on the market today from multiple dealerships and all of them returned a short dataset.

1FTRW07L43KD01241
1FMFU17L94LB60432
1FTRW12W65KC97784
JM1NC25F160114359
JTDBT4K38A4067275
3VWRW3AL0AM011110
JA3AJ26E35U053323

Not sure what the issue is but anyway I can help you to resolve it, just let me know.

Regards,
Jacob