Web services API filter operators

Many of the Magento web services API methods facilitate listing certain types of data - customers, products, orders, etc. However, when using these methods we rarely want to retrieve every record. Luckily there are a number of filter operators that can be used to narrow the result set that will be returned.

The following is a basic example of how to get a list of all customers in PHP:

$server = new SoapClient('http://magentohost/api/soap/?wsdl');
$sessionID = $server->login('api_user', 'api_key');
$server->call($sessionID, 'customer.list');

Now, suppose we want to retrieve only those customers updated since 10/06/2009. We can do this by adding a filter operator to the last line:

$server->call($sessionID, 'customer.list', array(array('updated_at' => array('from' => '2009-06-10'))));

$server->call($sessionID, 'customer.list', array(array('email' => array('like' => 'jim%'))));

There are quite a few filter operators available which directly correspond to SQL operators, since that's what they are translated to internally.