Greetings,
I’ve just pushed JBidwatcher 2.1.2 out; it fixes a few important problems, and will hopefully be stable for the next month or more, as I take time off for the birth of my second child.

Best of luck with your auctions!

— Morgan Schweers, Cyber**FOX**!

Hi, I dont know about this latest release but in the previous one drag and drop from normal search results in a web browser did not work (you had click the item in the results so you saw the item info before dragging that URL over). Well this version doesnt even work for that. I have to copy the item number manually and use the Add auction button in JBidWatcher.

I dont know how you parse the URLs but they differ from site to site (USA, UK, Germany) depending on which kind of user interface you have chosen for your ebay session (they seem to have new “looks” going on now and then). For example it does not like this URL when I drag it from Chrome to JBidWatcher (I get the drop not accepted cursor):

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/AMIGA-SECRET-MONKEY-ISLAND-ORIGINAL-RELEASE-VGC-/120624117605?pt=UK_VintageComputing_RL&hash=item1c15c1f765#ht_500wt_1154

Perhaps you have to run JBidWatcher as an admin or something in Win7?

Running it as Administrator didnt help either. It doesnt work with this URL either, the kind I get from automatic searches and reminders on watches from ebay:

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/e11010.m43.l1123/7?euid=5a119e16d87743288bcf44eac33fd6f9&loc=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.com%2Fws%2FeBayISAPI.dll%3FViewItem%26item%3D130434041166%26ssPageName%3DADME%3AB%3AWNA%3AUS%3A1123

This one even has the itemnumber clearly as a parameter so I guess it must be a small bug to fix before you get your next child?
(the second one is much easier btw). :)

@johncl
For what it’s worth, I am able to drop the AMIGA-SECRET URL into jbw from firefox 3.6.9 on linux without problem. You might want to try a browser other than chrome and see what happens.

Dragging the rover.ebay.com URL doesn’t work for me on linux. Jbw says “Cannot add auction 7” for that URL.

Well, I tried Chrome, Firefox and IE on my Win7 system and drag and drop does not work from any of them, neither from a list view or from a detailed view on an ebay item.

Greetings,
@johncl – You started with ‘I dont know about this latest release…’ Well, this latest release (2.1.2) specifically included fixes to Drag and Drop.

JBidwatcher doesn’t (at this time) support the ‘rover’ URLs, because those are generally affiliate tracking links, and eBay’s not a fan of reading those automatically. In fact I got in a bit of trouble over that some time ago…

I’ll poke at it in the future, and see about parsing everything after the ‘loc=’ into a URL during drag-and-drop, but I won’t promise support for them until I’m a bit more confident I can do it without falling afoul of eBay’s affiliate concerns. It’s a touchy area with eBay.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Well, I am sorry but drag and drop does not work here at all on my newly installed Windows 7 Home Pro system using either web browser. Atmittedly I have not restarted my system since installing JBidWatcher, but knowing its a Java application I doubt this will have any effect.

Ah and yes I did check that I am running 2.1.2 so it should be the latest one. I have tried restarting the app a couple of times but with no luck.

About the rover addresses I am not sure how these are a problem since I assume you only pick out the item ID out of it and add it to the list just as if adding an item id by the Add auction icon on the toolbar? And I guess you are using the ebay API for this application? (Thats at least what I have been using for my searching apps).

Other than that everything seems to work fine. :)

Greetings,
Sniping applications are barred from the API and all other official eBay avenues (affiliate, sandbox, etc.), so…no. :(

The right way to process the rover URL is to retrieve it and follow the 3XX redirect it returns, and parse the page it shows up on. In order to not do that I’d need to extricate the URL from the parameters of the rover query. It’s not hard, but it touches a few places (e.g. I have a ‘validity’ check for URLs to make sure I only take in valid eBay URLs.

I’m sorry about the drag and drop issues; that sounds very strange. Could you drag a link to ‘Write’ and create a ticket with the file as an attachment? I’m not sure if it’s a Windows 7 issue, or what it might be. I don’t run Windows 7 yet, unfortunately, and every platform I can find, drag and drop is working. I’ll try to help; I just don’t have an easy way to capture what JBidwatcher is seeing in the drop buffer.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!