Announcing v201403 of the DFP API

Today, we launch v201403 of the DFP API. This important release focuses our API by removing non-bulk methods and introduces some crowd favorite features like creating VAST video redirect creatives. A detailed list of these features and what’s changed can be found on our release notes page. Also, stay tuned for a special hangout on March 24th where we’ll go over all of these new features and discuss some common topics brought up on our forum.

Bulking up

Starting in v201403, we've removed all non-bulk methods from the API, such as OrderService.getOrder and LineItemService.createLineItem. The goal of this is to encourage you to think about your applications holistically. Instead of fetching a single order, sync orders regularly using lastModifiedDateTime and instead of creating or updating a single line item, group them together, e.g. create all orders first, then line items, and then creatives instead of one at a time.

If you do need to fetch a single object, we recommend following the pattern (in Java):

  // Create a statement to only select a single
  // order by ID.
  StatementBuilder statementBuilder =
      new StatementBuilder()
          .where("id = :id")
          .orderBy("id ASC")
          .limit(1)
          .withBindVariableValue("id", orderId);

  // Get the order.
  OrderPage page = orderService.
      getOrdersByStatement(statementBuilder.toStatement());

  Order order = Iterables.getOnlyElement(
      Arrays.asList(page.getResults()));

Notice that you can easily turn this into a function if needed, and possibly implement a caching mechanism.

Creating video creatives

This launch marks our first steps into opening up the writability of video creatives. We are starting with VastRedirectCreatives, video creatives that store the VAST 2 or 3 tag URL on an external server. All other types of video creatives are still read-only for now. We will be looking into opening more externally hosted video creatives in the coming versions and please do let us know what you are looking for on our forum.

ClientLogin gets the axe

You will notice that starting in v201403, you must use OAuth2 to authenticate with the API. Using ClientLogin will result in an error from our servers. We've modified all of our client libraries to throw exceptions if you are using ClientLogin with any non-compatible version. If you need a refresher on how to use OAuth2, see a guide for Java, PHP, .NET, Python, or Ruby.

Look out, deprecation ahead

We are getting closer to the deprecation of v201206, v201204, v201203, v201201, v201111, and v201108. These versions will be turned off on April 1st. If you have not yet, please upgrade to v201403 and OAuth2 as soon as possible. As a Java developer, you will also notice that v201403 is only available in the new Java client library and the old Java library will not receive any further feature enhancements.

As always, if you have any suggestions or questions about the new version, feel free to drop us a line on our Ads Developer Google+ page.

 - Adam Rogal, DFP API Team