is there a limit on the number of years?

[Uwe11]

Thanks for this (almost) perfect add-in. Really appreciate it.

Just as a question, I see year buttons from 2025 back to 2004.
Manually on Amazon I see also the years 2000-2003. Any hint why these years are missing? Or by purpose?

Not particularly important to grap 20-year-old orders, simply curious.

[philipmulcahy]

Great question!

In the beginning the extension could fetch all the available years, all at once.

That didn't work too well once I shared it, because some folks had a lot more orders than me, and it took longer to scrape those years than their patience allowed (also it didn't do a great job of displaying progress).

Problem 1: I was deluged in complaints. This was long before I monetized the business-focussed parts of the extension for charity. The delugers, who to a remarkable degree of consistency were unable or unwilling to read any of the documentation I had written for them before firing up their complaint keyboards.
Solution: only scrape one year at a time.

Problem 2 Next, I started to get complaints from users who were getting only partial results for older years.
It turned out that while amazon was "advertising" those years in the pulldown picker, it had ceased to actually back up that promise with the availability of some of the order details for some users (including me).
Solution trim the available years list progressively until the complaints died down.

There's nothing stopping you running a private copy that has the constraint removed, but last time I explored relaxing it (about two years ago) I found that the data quality problem had not been resolved, so I'm not likely to ingest a pull request without convincing evidence.

Yours,

Philip

[Uwe11]

Reasonable and sufficient answer for me. I don't like either to put to much effort on 20 year old data.
Thank you

Still great stuff!

[sharinaradia]

Hello hello! Quick question for you... did you remove the previous year buttons? I need to get 2024.

Love what you do, thank you! :)

[philipmulcahy]

It (probably) wasn’t me! If you cannot see any year buttons it’ll be because the extension hasn’t managed to find the years yet. A few months ago I changed the code that does the available year finding work because for some users Amazon had changed the relevant page in a bad way. More specifically, the years didn’t appear in the html until after some amazon javascript code embedded in the page had finished running. My new code loads up the page in such a way that the javascript can do its thing. Meanwhile my code is watching and waiting. When it sees the years appear it shares them with the rest of the extension and shuts that page down. You should be able to see this happening in real time, because when one of those “special” pages is loaded (where amazon javascript is allowed to run), I have it show a rectangle like this at the top of the page:  The yellow text is an explanation of what it’s trying to do. The blue text is the URL it’s working with. The grey text is an ID you can use to associate it with lines in the console log file. The little square (bottom left) is the I-frame (that’s a representation of the web page where the hopefully good stuff is happening - I should probably make it invisible but haven’t gotten around to it). Q: That’s all very interesting Philip, but where does that leave me? A: If it were me, I’d be taking a look at the console log to see if it yields any clues as to why the years are not being found. A: I’d also take a look at the URL in your version of the box above and load it in a tab to see if it renders with a pulldown control with your years in it. A: I’d also experiment with clearing the extension’s cache and closing all amazon windows you have open, and then re-opening just one of them before trying again. A: if none of that works, then (immediately after clearing the amazon cache, and only having one amazon tab open), reload that tab and then capture the console log for that tab, with the most verbose settings (look high and right for verbosity checkboxes, and I think it’s right click in the log for the save command). Yours, Philip

…

On 22 Sep 2025, at 17:01, sharinaradia ***@***.***> wrote: Hello hello! Quick question for you... did you remove the previous year buttons? I need to get 2024. Love what you do, thank you! :) Screenshot.2025-09-22.at.8.59.24.AM.png (view on web) <https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/fc2f76cf-d823-4234-8e92-444d2b9095fe> — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#358 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAMXOHBP3KWSH6KXX5TVLY33UAMMRAVCNFSM6AAAAACHFYF5BOVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTINBXHAZDSOA>. You are receiving this because you commented.