I got this wild hair up my nose about "wouldn't it be cool to show a random item from my Amazon wishlist on my site?" the other day. I looked around, found plenty of wishlist scripts, but none of them did what I wanted. They all showed the first X items on your list sorted by Y, for various Xs and Ys. Nothing random out there.

So I dug around and learned and read and dug some more. I found the Drupal Amazon module, which seemed promising. It had item lookup and wishlist support. Seems great! I downloaded and installed it and found it didn't do wishlists. Bummer. But it did include a way to make raw AWS calls, so I should be set.

I was up all night, but I got it to work. You can see it in the bottom-most block on the right -- a random item from my wishlist! I'm here to show you how I did it..but first a disclaimer. I'm not a PHP programmer, I've never worked with the AWS before, and it was late at night. Forgive my code.

Once the Amazon module is installed, I plugged this code into a block:

<?php
$list = '2ZR320UHXZ47K';

$params = array(
  'ListType' => 'WishList',
  'ListId' => $list,
  'ProductGroup' => 'Book',
  'ResponseGroup' => 'ListFull',
);
$results = amazon_http_request('ListLookup', $params);
if (!empty($results->Error)) {
  return;
}

$total_items = (int)$results->Lists->List->TotalItems;
$random_item = rand(1, $total_items) - 1;
$page = (int)($random_item / 10) + 1;
$item_on_page = $random_item % 10;

$params = array(
  'ListType' => 'WishList',
  'ListId' => $list,
  'ResponseGroup' => 'ListItems',
  'ProductGroup' => 'Book',
  'ProductPage' => $page
);
$results = amazon_http_request('ListLookup', $params);
if (empty($results->Error)) {
  $asin = $results->Lists->List->ListItem[$item_on_page]->Item->ASIN;

  $items = amazon_item_lookup($asin);
  if (is_array($items)) {
    $item = array_pop($items);
    $item[detailpageurl] .= '%26colid='.$list;
    amazon_item_save($item);
    $markup = theme('amazon_item', $item, 'details');
    print $markup;
  }
}

?>

The code basically asks AWS to pass us back some information about the wishlist -- in particular, we want the total number of items in the list. From that, we pick a random item and calculate which page it's on. Each page has 10 items on it when you get the data this way. Handy. Then we just slurp down that page of the wishlist and extract the item we're interested in.

The $list variable at the top is the unique ID of your wishlist. Go view your wishlist and look at the URL...you can find it there. I also made some changes to the tpl files the module uses to display the information, but that's just seasoning to taste.

So there you have it. A slightly sloppy way to retrieve a random item from an Amazon wishlist!