Check if product exists without exception in API

Question

Is there a way to check whether a product already exists in Magento using the SOAP API that doesn't require using exception handling for the control flow?

I have the following code that works, but I wouldn't say it follows best practices.

Dim productExists As Boolean
Try
    Dim webService As MagentoService = New MagentoWS.MagentoService
    Dim productInfo As catalogProductReturnEntity = webService.catalogProductInfo(sSessionId, sku, String.Empty, Nothing, "sku")
    productExists = True
Catch ex As SoapHeaderException
    productExists = False
End Try

I have to catch the SoapHeaderException and then use the fact that the exception was thrown to know that the product doesn't exist.

Answer 1

I'm not sure how .NETs SOAP API would handle this, but I'd try using the catalog_product.list method with a SKU filter. If the resulting list/array/collection/whatever-its-serialized-as is empty, then you know the product doesn't exist.

Per the comments below, the following code should get you that list

Dim productExists As Boolean 
Dim webService As MagentoService = New MagentoWS.MagentoService 
Dim filters As filters = New filters() 
filters.filter = {New associativeEntity() With {.key = "sku", .value = sku}} 

Dim productInfo As catalogProductEntity() = webService.catalogProductList(sSessionId, filters, String.Empty) 

productExists = productInfo.Count() > 0