Migrating from version 1 to version 2

New features introduced in version 2:

• You can now use JSON or XML as the request and response formats.
• You can now get per-product data quality information from the new productstatuses service.
• Data quality and destination status information has been moved to the new productstatuses service.
• OAuth 2.0 Service Accounts can now be used with the API.
• Inventory-only updates (price and availability) are now available for all products through the inventory service.
• Request batching is now available for all services, not just products.
• Account and user management services now work for all accounts, not just MCAs.
• Libraries and sample code for more languages. We continue to offer Java, PHP, Python, and .NET. We've added Go, JavaScript, Objective-C, and Ruby. There are also specific libraries for Node.js and GWT.

Authentication and root URL

• OAuth 2.0 is now the only supported authentication method.
• The OAuth 2.0 scope for the API changes from https://www.googleapis.com/auth/structuredcontent to https://www.googleapis.com/auth/content.
• The root URL for the API changes from https://content.googleapis.com/content/v1/ to https://www.googleapis.com/content/v2/.

Request and response

• The default response type is now JSON. To get an XML response you need to add a query string parameter of alt=xml to your API request URLs.
• Version 1 of the API used Atom Feeds as the data interchange format. In version 2 the XML documents are generic. In particular:
  • In version 1 you were required to use an HTTP Content-Type header of application/atom+xml. In version 2 this should be application/json or application/xml.
  • Neither the request nor response XML documents use any namespaces.
  • In version 1 the root element of a collection was <feed>. In version 2 it is a more specific element such as: <products>, <accounts>, <datafeeds>.
  • Similarly, single resources in version 1 were contained in an <entry> element. In version 2 it is a more specific element such as: <product>, <account>, <datafeed>.

Products

• Data quality and destination status information has been moved to a new service called productstatuses.
• It is no longer possible to get performance data from the Content API.
• Warnings now have their own top-level field and are always returned.
• atom:id is now id.
• sc:id is now offer_id.
• All the fields that are present in version 1 but that are not present in the latest Merchant Center feed specification have been retired:
  • author
  • edition
  • feature
  • featured_product
  • genre
  • manufacturer
  • product_review_average
  • product_review_count
  • quantity
  • year
• All the fields present in the latest Merchant Center feed specification but not in version 1 have been added:
  • custom_label_0
  • custom_label_1
  • custom_label_2
  • custom_label_3
  • custom_label_4
  • energy_efficiency_class
  • identifier_exists
  • merchant_multipack_quantity
  • online_only
  • unit_pricing_measure
  • unit_pricing_base_measure
• The Brazil-only field installment and the Japan-only field loyalty_points are first-class fields in version 2. In version 1 they were accepted only as custom attributes.
• For consistency with product statuses, the former repeated fields excluded_destination, required_destination and validate_destination are now a single repeated field whose elements specify "excluded", "required" or "validate".
• status='review' in sc:status has been replaced by the presence of the destination in a read-only validated_destination repeated field.
• sc:attribute and sc:group are now custom_attribute and custom_group.

Managed Accounts

• The managedaccounts services are split into accounts and accountstatuses.
• You can fetch and update your primary account, not just sub-accounts.
• The former content field is no longer used.
• The link field has been renamed website_url.
• A new users field provides a list of users associated with the account.

Data Quality

• The dataquality services are split into the accountstatuses and productstatuses services.
• policy now has sub-elements destinations and issue_group_references instead of a concatenated list of strings.

Users

• Users are now managed as part of the accounts service. Manage users by setting the value of the users field of an account.

Data Feeds

• In version 2 there are no default destinations. You must specify them using the new intended_destination field which replaces the feed_destination field.