batch_job['DownloadUrl'] sometimes is null

[sliu-walmart]

We’ve been using the same pattern of accessing AdWords batch service as this example. However, since about 10 days ago after we upgraded our python googleads library to 12.2.0 from 9.0.0, we started to receive intermittent issues with these two lines.

The error message quoted below seems to indicate the batch_job[‘downloadUrl’] object is null even if the “downloadUrl” key is present in the batch_job object.

url = batch_job['downloadUrl']['url']
TypeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute '__getitem__'

Retry the script usually eventually fixes this issue, but every day we got some jobs failing too many times even after retrying and people getting the alert messages have to manually retry the jobs. We looked up the releasing notes from version 10.0.0 but couldn’t find anything related.

Can you check what is causing this issue and what should be the best practice for us moving forward?

[msaniscalchi]

Hello,

Thanks for the report! Some additional context may be helpful:

• What Python version are you using?
• Are you using the suds-jurko library or zeep as your SOAP client?
• Does this happen for a specific type of operation?
• Does this tend to happen for large jobs? How large are those you're running when this happens?
• Do you have a trivialized example that can be used to reproduce?

Regards,
Mark

[sliu-walmart]

@msaniscalchi Thanks for looking into this. Please see below for my responses.

• We're using Python 2.7.11.
• We didn't manually install any SOAP client lib, but pip shows we have suds-jurko 0.6 and zeep 3.0.0 installed.
• The error happens when we're creating either entire campaign structure or ad groups in existing campaigns.
• The size of jobs doesn't appear to be a factor. We've seen this occurring for jobs with just ~400 entities to jobs with several thousand entities.
• We don't have examples for easy reproduction of the issue. As I said repeated retrying eventually would go through.

[ravichandrasekaran]

We just starting seeing a very similar error on upgrading from API version v201802 to v201809 and upgrading our Python package from 10.0.1 to 15.0.1.

url = batch_job['downloadUrl']['url']
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not subscriptable

• We're using Python 3.6.5.
• We also didn't manually install any SOAP client libraries, but pip shows us with suds-jurko 0.6 and zeep 3.2.0.
• We're doing batch operations to reset bid values. They are typically pretty large.
• Our code is very tightly modeled on the Google Ads Python library example code in this repo: https://github.com/googleads/googleads-python-lib/blob/master/examples/adwords/v201809/campaign_management/add_keywords_using_incremental_batch_job.py
• We run multiple accounts, and the batch operation succeeded on some, and threw the error above on others.

One change we made was to explicitly look for a 'DONE' batch job status, rather than relying only on the presence of the 'downloadUrl' property. It's hard to tell if that solved the problem, or if simply retrying it avoided the failure.

googleads-python-lib/examples/adwords/v201809/campaign_management/add_keywords_using_incremental_batch_job.py

Line 221 in fe86335

if 'downloadUrl' in batch_job:

[christopherseeley]

The AdWords API has been turned down and replaced by the Google Ads API:
https://github.com/googleads/google-ads-python