A new way to access our Ads SOAP APIs through Python

The Ads APIs Python client library, adspygoogle, has been around for quite some time, supporting versions of Python as old as 2.4 but capping out at 2.7. We’ve been getting more and more feedback recently that our users want Python 3 support. Also, many of adspygoogle’s dependencies are dated and no longer officially supported. We heard you, and with these items in mind...

A New Client Library

A completely new client library — googleads — is now available for Python 3 as well as Python 2.7. The new library has several advantages over our existing library:

• Most of your code from the previous Python library will work with minimal modifications, listed below and in our migration guide.
• The dependencies are all hosted on PyPI, so you do not need to use the --allow-external or --allow-unverified flags at install.
• The constructors and attributes in the new library give you more control over client objects; for example, you can easily switch out OAuth 2.0 credentials and manage multiple accounts.
• Data types are retained. Whereas adspygoogle uses strings for everything, googleads can send and receive numbers, booleans, datetimes, etc.
• The library is more integrated with the Python standard library; for example, you can use the built-in logging framework to log SOAP messages.
• The library is built on top of a fork of suds and allows users who are familiar with suds to take advantage of that library’s features.

Migrating to the New Client Library

Existing Python users can retain almost all of their logic working with the objects defined in our APIs. An important difference is that your responses from the API are now objects returned by suds instead of dictionaries. The objects support using dictionary syntax to retrieve values but you cannot use dictionary methods on them. Most importantly, this means that .get() and .update() are no longer supported. Where in adspygoogle you may have done this:

response = inventory_service.GetAdUnitsByStatement(statement.ToStatement())[0] ad_units = response.get('results')

You will now need to do this:

response = inventory_service.getAdUnitsByStatement(statement.ToStatement()) ad_units = response['results'] if 'results' in response else None

Some more minor changes that need to be made include changing your code to use the new methods for instantiating client and service objects and using the exact method names from our APIs, which are generally lower camel case.

For more information on migration, check out the migration guide we have posted in the new library’s wiki section.

The googleads library will be the primary focus of development moving forward. The existing adspygooglelibrary is now in maintenance mode but we will continue to add support for new AdWords and DFP API releases through December, 2014.

If you find any bugs, have a patch to contribute or just a feature request, please feel free to file an issue on theissue tracker.

 - Joseph DiLallo, Ads Developer Relations Team