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How-to Use StubHub’s Listing Catalog Service

Intended Audience

External StubHub Clients wishing to access our internal Listing Catalog data.

Objective

The aim of this document is to provide some background and examples for how to retrieve data from StubHub’s Listing Catalog Service (or LCS) using our proprietary query string structure.

1) What kind of data can I get from the Listing Catalog Service (LCS)?

Fig. 1 the relationship between Genres, Geos, Events and Tickets

The Listing Catalog Service provides detailed Ticket Listing and Event data, as well as information about the classifications of that data.

• An Event may be a Sports, Concerts, Theater, or Exclusives event, for which StubHub permits Sellers to post tickets up for sale on www.stubhub.com.

• A Genre is a category which classifies an Event. An Event is directly associated with a detailed-level Genre. For example a ‘New York Yankees’ Event or game is directly associated with a ‘New York Yankees Tickets’ Genre. That Genre, in turn is classified under a more generic ‘Baseball’ Genre. Genre data can be thought of as a category classification. Later in this document, we will be using terms like ‘Search Dimension’, or ‘Meta Data’ when we refer to such category classification data.

• A Geography or ‘geo’ is a location of an Event. Geo data can be thought of as a category classification. Later in this document, we will be using terms like ‘Search Dimension’, or ‘Meta Data’ when we refer to such category classification data.

• A Ticket Listing is a batch of individual tickets that Sellers may post up for sale on the Site. Ticket Listings are associated with specific Events. Ticket Listings are setup with different restrictions, like the sale method (e.g. auction, fixed price, etc.) or whether the Seller is fine with selling the constituent tickets in multiple batches, or only as a single batch (e.g. ticket listing ‘splits’ may or may not be allowed). Ticket Listings also contain information about the general type of seat within a specific venue (.e.g Row and Section). It also lists the single price that each ticket within the listing is to be sold for, per the Seller’s preference.

2) How is the data organized?

The data resides within what are called ‘Index Documents’ where each unique document instance refers to a unique occurrence of a Genre, Geo, Event or Ticket (ticket listing) data set. Within each document there are ‘Fields’ which provide the name and value of a single attribute that can be searched for. For example, a Client could enter a search query string for all Ticket document instances where the value of the named ‘Price’ field is within a certain range: [50 TO 100].

3) What else do I need to know to get started with using LCS?

Section 2 goes into a general overview of the Listing Catalog Service and how it interfaces with Client applications.

Section 3 provides a Quickstart Guide which will show some typical examples for how you can write search queries against the Listing Catalog Service.

Later in this document, we will provide more detail on both the organization of the data, as well as the various query string conventions used to search for that data. Finally, Section 4 provides further detail about the specific field level data available for each major indexed document type.

4) Third-Party Documentation on SOLR

LCS was built based on the SOLR-Lucene Text Search Apache Open Source Software. It uses a HTTP Request; and Response interface.The response may be specified to be formatted in various XML-based formats, such as JSON.

To get more information about SOLR and how this affects the LCS Query syntax; please refer to the following URLs:

1) General SOLR query syntax: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrQuerySyntax

2) General SOLR information: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/

Overview of StubHub’s Listing Catalog Service(LCS) and its Client Interface

Core Application Service Provider Architecture based on an HTTP Request and XML-over-HTTP Response

Anatomy of a Listing Catalog Service HTTP Request

Quickstart Guide with Examples for Querying for Data from the Listing Catalog Service (LCS)

Specific Document Field data that is available from the StubHub Listing Catalog can be found here:
http://publicfeed.stubhub.com/listingCatalog/static/schema.xml

Index Document Data Structure

Listing Catalog Document Types

Document Type Relationships

Document Field Types and How to query for fields of different types

Detailed Document Field Descriptions

Genre Index Document

Geography Index Document

Event Index Document

Ticket Index Document

General Query Techniques

PHP Code Samples

Troubleshooting and FAQ