My goal is to get a list of eBay categories programmatically.
It appears that the GetCategories method is only available from the Trading API. If I understand correctly, there is user interaction required to log into the Trading API: http://developer.ebay.com/DevZone/XML/docs/HowTo/Tokens/GettingTokens.html
Is there another method to get the eBay categories list programmatically?
I'm using Drupal 7, so PHP.
You do not need a token to get the categories. All you need is your App-ID
The link below with your APP-ID will return the XML category listing from site: UK (siteid=3) Setting CategoryID=-1 starts the list at the root level, you can start from any category, just use IncludeSelector=ChildCategories to get children
Now just use SimpleXML or whatever to parse.
This may have been correct at the time, however this call in the API now only returns you one level of categories, not the entire hierarchy. To do it for a whole site, in one request (which can get quite large) you need to use the GetCategories call with a valid Ebay token, and specify <DetailLevel>ReturnAll</DetailLevel> and <ViewAllNodes>true</ViewAllNodes>.
Also note you will need to update these regularly and provide a mapping algorithm as Ebay expires and remaps categories to new names / ids over time.
You can use the following url to get the top level category list. Once you get the list of the categories, you can check if [LeafCategory] is true or false. If it is true for the category, you can again fetch the sub-category by specifying the categoryParentId. You can use the php Curl to get the results and then you can use simple_xml_object to fetch the returned xml response
$url= 'http://open.api.ebay.com/Shopping?callname=GetCategoryInfo&appid=YOUR-APP-ID&siteid=3&CategoryID=-1&version=729&IncludeSelector=ChildCategories';
$sXML = download_page($url);
$oXML = simplexml_load_string($sXML);
print_r($oXML);exit;
function download_page($path){
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$path);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15);
$retValue = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $retValue;
}
