Does anyone think there might be a way to create a Chrome extension that would be able to automatically add Amazon items to a tap forms list? Or is that just some pie in the sky impossibility?
You can do it but it relies upon using CouchDB sync (or Cloudant) to land the items. I use CouchDB as my sync and I have a bunch of Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey scripts that I use to push stuff into Tap Forms.
Basically you can create a document in CouchDB with the same structure as a Tap Forms record. CouchDB let’s you do a POST to it to create a record via it’s web interface, Tap Forms then sees that record as a new record and it pops into it’s UI.
I have two scripts that I use to automatically import this forum into a Tap Forms document as I navigate around it, essentially each time I go to a page on the forum, it scrapes the page into CouchDB and then shows up in Tap Forms. Here’s a copy of the topic collector piece that shows importing topics and authors as new records. It’s a bit of a hack as there are some protections on the tapforms.com side to prevent sending to external domains (hence the cspbypass.google-analytics.com hack).
I started building one to import Amazon product pages but I never finished it. It’s a fair amount of work to basically use Javascript to extract out the pieces of the page you’re interested in and then splice it into a Tap Forms document. Not impossible just time consuming.
What about something that triggers a Form Script in Tap Forms that uses the new parameters feature that then causes the script to call back to an Amazon API to get the product details? I don’t know anything about building Chrome extensions though.
But there’s information about calling a Tap Forms Script from a URL and passing it parameters here:
https://www.tapforms.com/help-mac/5.3/en/topic/javascript-api
Amazon doesn’t have a consumer accessible API to retrieve product details, I looked and went digging and such a thing just doesn’t exist. On top of that they have pretty good anti-scraping systems in place as well.
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