Don't show items in Orders

[axjasf]

Hi Philip,

it's great to see that you're still working on this project.

I would like to ask if its possible to make the order list come with an option to not show any items. Especially for big lists, this would help tremendously. I am currently working on a little tool that combines your scraper with Actual Budget (https://actualbudget.org/download/) and allows to enrich their transactions with a percentage split by category, that's what it would be useful for.

[philipmulcahy]

1. Does anyone else want this?

2. Is there a reason why folks cannot filter the items out in their own post-scrape workflow?

3. @axjasf I assume you know that category is a per-item thing, so with just the order table, you are not going to be going to space today. I suspect I am missing some subtlety of your use-case, because I am worried that you are arguing that because you don't need a field azad should make it optional. If that is your request, then I cannot claim to be enthused.

p.s.
I seem to remember there's a really old open bug/ticket complaining that only the first 10 items are captured per order, because azad doesn't know to page through to the next 10 etc - in respect of this ticket (#319), that bug seems like a feature. No-one seems to care enough to provide me with the debug info I need to fix this: none of my orders ever have even 10 items: Amazon seemed adept at splitting my purchases into multiple orders when I spent my own money buying tatty rinkets to try and reproduce.

[axjasf]

@philipmulcahy - The sheer size of these order files regularly made my browser collapse. I need to download several years of orders and items, and our orders often have hundreds of items (e.g. Amazon grocery). However, this might not be necessary for me atm, I forked the project yesterday and removed the field myself from the report. An option field in your solution would be more elegant (or remove it all) as I never understood why the Order files include a list of all the items. You are already separating between Orders, Items, Transactions, Shipments.

And yes, my tool takes order files and joins them with the item files and then proposes item categories based on my own budget categories and creates percentage splits in the Actuals app database.

Nonetheless, given that the circumstances have changed - if no one else needs it, please feel free to just close this without further ado.

[philipmulcahy]

I don't think that hundreds of SKUs per order can be reported by azad - it only scrapes the first ten - I consider this a bug - in fact it's a long standing open ticket: #42, but no-one has yet stayed the course and furnished me with the assistance I need to fix it. Q: Why only the first ten? A: that's all Amazon show (in every order I've ever seen) without you having to click UI to page through to more items. Q: so you know what's wrong? A: yes, but I don't have html from example orders - see commentary on #42. For avoidance of doubt, the limitation to 10 reported item "codes" per order applies to the items table as well as the orders table - it's an underlying data problem, not a display problem. If you were to demonstrate that Amazon have elected to show all the SKUs on the same page for an order with more than ten, then I would sit up and pay attention - it would be a problem for the orders table.

If you're saying that chrome falls over while generating the csv, I must admit to being curious as to the cause - the heavy lifting has already happened at that point.

Scraping several years at a time is conveniently (for me) impossible - I disabled that capability years ago - the actual use-case for it is super weak, and turning it off has substantially reduced support noise for me. There's no technical reason why you cannot easily re-enable it - you need to add a single button, wire in the messaging, and the actual functional code could probably be sorted out in a line or two, but if you're telling me you've got performance problems with a single year, then I suggest not doing so.

Q (yours): why does the order table include an items summary?
A: In the beginning there was only one table. People wanted some idea of what they'd bought so I came up with a linky string representation that could be stuffed into one column. Most folks were satisfied with this, for a while, but then the drop shippers revealed their wicked ways, and persuaded me to build the items table. Obviously I would not(corrected) have made Order.items if the items table already existed, but taking it away is not going to make me popular.