How do custom APIs handle different templates?

If the site you’re looking to process provides different layouts or templates for the same URL structure or pages, you can still process data with a Diffbot Custom API.

There are two primary ways to handle differing layouts:

Comma-separate different selectors from different templates

By comma-separating your selectors, Diffbot’s Custom API will look for all possible matches when extracting data. So if one layout provides data using a class name of .favorites and another layout uses a class name of .likes, and you wish to extract either using the same field, you can use the selector of .likes,.favorites to support both templates/layouts. The “likes” and “favorites” data will be returned in your single field.

Create a different field for each data type in each layout

Diffbot Custom APIs will only return data for a field if its selectors are found on the page; empty fields will be suppressed. So you can also simply create a new field name for new fields on different templates.

For instance, in the above example, you could create one field named likes with a selector of .likes, and one field named favorites with a selector named .favorites. When .likes is found on a page, the likes field will be returned; when .favorites is found, the favorites field will be returned.