Posting your listings directly to ClickaPost, as noted in section 1 above, is a task that requires a little more know-how and it’s mostly intended for those who wish to submit the data directly to us more than once a day, as well as for those who are making applications which need to interact with ClickaPost at all times.

For most people, using ClickaPost API section under My ClickaPost module will prove to be more than enough for regular data entry. In this case, all one has to do is provide a direct link to a valid XML file and ClickaPost will check this file every night and download any new posts automatically.

The XML file has to conform to the same specifications as when posting directly to ClickaPost (as explained in section 1), with one difference. You do not need the <token> entry in this file, and if you are not explicitly setting the <strict> tag to TRUE, you do not even need the <auth> branch.

• VERY IMPORTANT:
• NEVER include the <token> in any XML file which you have publicly available on-line!

This is SAME as giving someone your ClickaPost Username and Password! With this token anyone can directly access the API and post under your account! If you ever have a feeling your token’s security may be jeopardized, you can always regenerate a unique 64bit token in ClickaPost API section of My ClickaPost module.

With this in mind, an imaginary sample XML file hosted on http://some.domain.ext/youNameIt.xml could look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<request>
<posts>
	<post>
		<customId>12345</customId>
		<title>This is a simple test post</title>
		<category>241</category>
		<description>This is a description of the simple test post. It will allow people to immediately start playing around with our API and get more posts into the system.</description>
		<country>USA</country>
	</post>
</posts>
</request>

NOTE: It is strongly recommended for you to utilize the <customId> tag for your posts in order to eliminate any duplicate posts, especially if your XML file contains ALL of your posts (both new and old), and not just new posts. If your XML file is generated every day and it contains only the new posts for that day – you should be fine. If you want to be sure – simply include <customId> in all of your XML files and you’ll have nothing to worry about.

ClickaPost API section in My ClickaPost module has a very nice feature which allows you to test your XML feed without processing it fully and saving the posts. This dry-run capability allows you to test your XML feed for any errors before you set it to run automatically every night. One click of a button will activate Ajax based XML server which will process your feed and show you the results immediately.

In this section you will also find latest logs from your nightly XML imports so you may troubleshoot any previous imports and be always up-to date on how your sync is going.

• What happens after XML is processed - get familiar with internal workings of ClickaPost
• Updating Posts via API - not every post has to be a new post, here's how to update them instead