Scrapy request return notImplementedError

Question

My scrapy code doesn't work and I have no clue ! I want to scrape the Ikea website, I designed first a CrawlSpider which was not specific enough to retrieve every links of the webpage. So I designed a basic Spider with yield request method.

Here is my code :

class IkeaSpider(scrapy.Spider) :        
    name = "Ikea"
    allower_domains = ["http://www.ikea.com/"]
    start_urls = ["http://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/catalog/productsaz/8/"]



    def parse_url(self, response):

        for sel in response.xpath('//div[@id="productsAzLeft"]'):

            base_url = 'http://www.ikea.com/'
            follow_url = sel.xpath('//span[@class="productsAzLink"]/@href').extract()
            complete_url = urlparse.urljoin(base_url, follow_url)
            request = Request(complete_url, callback = self.parse_page)

            yield request


    def parse_page(self, response):

And here is the log of errors :

2016-01-04 22:06:31 [scrapy] ERROR: Spider error processing <GET http://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/catalog/productsaz/8/> (referer: None)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/twisted/internet/defer.py", line 588, in _runCallbacks
    current.result = callback(current.result, *args, **kw)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/spiders/__init__.py", line 76, in parse
    raise NotImplementedError
NotImplementedError

Answer 1

Your spider needs a parse method which is the default callback for all initial requests. You can just rename the parse_url method to parse and it will work fine.

class IkeaSpider(scrapy.Spider) :

    name = "Ikea"
    allower_domains = ["http://www.ikea.com/"]
    start_urls = ["http://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/catalog/productsaz/8/"]


    def parse(self, response):

        for sel in response.xpath('//div[@id="productsAzLeft"]'):

            base_url = 'http://www.ikea.com/'
            follow_url = sel.xpath('//span[@class="productsAzLink"]/@href').extract()
            complete_url = urlparse.urljoin(base_url, follow_url)
            request = Request(complete_url, callback = self.parse_page)

            yield request

Alternatives

You can also define a start_requests method and yield scrapy.Requests manually with a defined callback argument just like you did here.

Answer 2

You have to implement the parse method if you only want to use start_urls from a spider, as you can check here

the parse method is the default callback for the requests made from the urls inside start_urls.

If you want to control the requests from the start, you can also use the start_requests method.