Category Archives: Applications

Applications, PHP

Facebook Integration Initial Steps

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The next few posts will examine how I will integrate a Facebook application into one of my sites: stephenhird.com. If you have browsed to this site, you will see there is already a Facebook platform there. And while it does show some of the great things to do with the API, it is very basic and really does nothing. So In this post I will examine what I want to do with it, how to set up an initial application on Facebook, and then go from there. This will likely happen over the next few weeks/months and will be a little more drawn out depending on how much time I have to document this process. This is step one, and step one will always include planning.

First I need to figure out what I want to have on my site. Since it is my name that is on the URL, I will need to create a way that this site will be an online portfolio, biography and information repository. When doing this for any site, it is important to remember your brand. Even for individual sites like this, it is important for branding, because this is who I am, I do not want it to be a classic case of slop on the web. This site before was mainly just a testing ground and now will need to be more.

A side note here, my name is the same spelling as a famous photographer based in London. His site is well put together with good descriptive links and a great example of combining minimalist ideas with styled presentation. He keeps his brand on the pages and the site does not confuse or mislead with extra peripheral items, or overuse of Flash or other heavy web technologies loading down the page. His site is located at: http://www.stephenhird.co.uk/

OK, now on to the planning and setting up the Facebook Application.
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Applications, PHP

Facebook Integration

As you have probably noticed, I have integrated a pseudo-Facebook hook into my little WordPress blog. I am wanting more comments to come thru via Facebook, and am building a full Facebook application that will integrate my posts in a non WordPress format, link to different resources on command and provide a way to search and query those items. All on Facebook. The way I am doing this right now is using the Facebook Application with the iframe setting.

So if you have not had a chance to connect to my Facebook App, here is a shameless plug to go ahead and do this now. I will combining the HirdWeb page with the HirdWeb Application. Since I am on Facebook quite a bit, and doing applications for Facebook API integration, I will start to share some of those techniques.

The application I will be walking through is an application I already have half way set up at my own site: www.stephenhird.com. This will soon be taken down and I will be putting up a better site to show the power of the Facebook API and how to integrate your site with Facebook for different things. As always, I will post the entire code page and any connections it needs to have. I will also post the directory structure of a possible integration of the Facebook API into an external application.

Applications

Testing the NuSOAP Webservice in C#

For the past few posts, the main focus has been a NuSOAP Webservice that does really basic things with very limited data. The different functions of the service have done a variety of things:

  • showNumbers – Returns an array of numbers in a non-assoc array key format
  • showMadLib – Returns a mad lib based on the data it is sent. Need 4 Adjectives, 2 Adverbs, 3 Nouns, 1 Verb, and 2 Verb: Past Tense. It replies with a string that contains the madlib.
  • showGroupItems – Simplistic service to return an array of items for a specific event, the ones available are: movie, picnic, drive, shopping
  • showTaxes – Shows the taxes based on state taxes. Currently, the only states available in this are: AZ,AL,AK, CA, OR, WA, UT, ID, WY, Defaults to CA if no state is provided. The input for this function is an array.
  • showPhrases – Shows a phrase from Shakespeare and replaces the name with the supplied name. ID is a number from 0 – 4

Although these are very basic and the real world applications are very limited, it can provide a spring board to building real world webservices that can be used for a variety of reasons. But, the power of webservices are that they can be code independent if written correctly. The server portion we have done is all in PHP. The client we have tested this on has been a PHP base. Based on the client functioning properly, we know that PHP based applications will be able to access the data. But the web is not 100% PHP based. Other code exists, which could be .NET flavors, Java, even ColdFusion. We need to ensure that the webservice built will be accepted by applications written in other languages.
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Applications, PHP

Modifying the NuSOAP Server

OK, the last couple of posts have strayed from the NuSOAP topic. but I wanted to do a quick post before going into to testing the server on a .NET application. The whole point of this post is to modify the result set we are sending back for some of the items. And let’s also change around one of the inputs so it accepts an array of data as the input, instead of strings. Hopefully this example will help others build a NuSOAP server. Which is why I am doing some of these examples. I was tired of seeing example after example of NuSOAP servers with a “Hello World” type of structure. That does not help in the real world. So hopefully these examples will help others.

First, we need to recall our last example we had out there, it was the following files:
Data Used: http://www.hirdweb.com/webservice/items.txt
Server File: http://www.hirdweb.com/webservice/20100720_server.txt
Client File: http://www.hirdweb.com/webservice/20100720.txt

We will be modifying those files, so if you do not already have those, you can grab those there. The data file “items” is ok, and we do not need to change anything there. The server file we will need to change, so go ahead and save that file with a new name. After you do that, you will need to change the line in the server that sets the wsdl address. I named the new file 20100805_server.php. 

$wsdl_addr = 'http://www.hirdweb.com/webservice/20100805_server.php';

The first thing to do is change the result set for the showNumbers functions. This is the function that accepts an identifier of 0 thru 5 and returns a list of numbers. It is a pretty simple example. In the real world, the identifier may be a book ISDN, or a product code, or a user id. Based on how you use this, it could return anything, like a list of authors (ISDN), or related products (product code), or friends (user ID). Or this can be used in conjunction with another function. But we need to format this a little better.
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Applications, PHP

Finishing up the NuSOAP server

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In the last post, the NuSOAP server introduced a new level of complexity, and had a multidimensional array, along with creating a more robust status message for the client to help determine the success or failure of the request. This post will examine the remaining functions in the NuSOAP server, and making the rest of the functions work, and more complex types including third and fourth level complexities along with a non-named (integer) array for the result.

We will be building on the code we used last time, so as a refresher, the code from the last post can be located at:
http://www.hirdweb.com/webservice/20100710_server.txt
http://www.hirdweb.com/webservice/20100710.txt

First off, here are the remaining functions to be exposed in the service:

  • showGroupItems – Shows what is needed based on a set event, all items are made up of course
  • showMadLib – Returns a mad lib based on passing in a number of different items
  • showNumbers – Returns a non associative array of numbers, requires an ID, and returns the numbers associated with that ID

Each of these webservices will require a little different structure.
showGroupItems will have a third level of complexity
showMadLib will require a long list of strings as the input
showNumbers will return an array of string elements, integer value for the element, instead of a named element
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Applications

Building on the NuSOAP Server

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The NuSOAP server consists of a function that will take an ID and a name/phrase and inserts that into the Shakespeare quote. The function returns a semi-complex type which consists of 2 array elements, a status message and the phrase. However, the webservice needs to expand, add a new function, and make error messages dynamic. So the first thing we will tackle is getting the status message into a more dynamic format.

First, plan it out, always plan it out. The status message will need to accept an “error code”, a string for the struct name, and a variable for a custom message if it does fit in within the specified error codes. Now, just as a disclaimer here, this is just an example of how it can be planned. Some services may not need this extent, some may need a lot more. Remember that it needs to be able to handle the requirements of your application.

With that planned out, here is a possible solution to the function. 

function error($err, $struct = 'phrase', $message = ''){
	$error['status']['status']='error';
	$error[$struct]= '';
	switch ($err) {
		case "empty":
			$error['status']['message']='There was nothing passed to the webservice, so nothing can be returned.';		
			break;
		case "partial":
			$error['status']['message']="Not all required parameters were passed, so the webservice can not return any information.";
			break;
		case "not_found":
			$error['status']['message']='The parameter you passed was not found, please try again.';
			break;
		case "bounds":
			$error['status']['message']='The ID that was passed is out of the allowable boundaires. Please try your request again.';
			break;
		case "less_than_zero":
			$error['status']['message']='The number recieved is less than zero, and will not work with this service. Please double check the number and try again.';
			break;
		case 'custom':
			$error['status']['message'] = $message;
			break;
		default:
			$error['status']['message'] = 'There was a problem with your request, please try again.';
			break;
	}
	return $error;	
}

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Applications

Simple NuSOAP Server

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In the previous post, we examined the client side of NuSOAP. In this post, we examine a very simplistic approach to building a server. In this example, it is going to use a very basic set up, and will return only a string. No complex data will be returned, and it will be a quick look at how to create a NuSOAP server. The more complex approaches will come later.

Using the previous information in the post, we have a client that we can text the service on. Before I complete the webservice server, I always do some quick testing of the functionality before sending it to the web service. In this example, we will use one of the services built previously:
showPhrases – Phrases from Shakespeare plays that replace the names in the phrase with the passed in name/string

This webservice requires 2 items to be passed:
id – A number from 0 to 4 (In this example I only used 5 phrases)
name – A name or variable that can be used to replace the names in the phrases

The first thing we should always do, is map out the plan for this function.
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Applications, PHP

Web Services with NuSOAP

Doing a lot with webservices lately. Which is really a great thing if there is a central repository of information that needs to be disseminated between different external systems. I am doing a lot with NuSOAP and php SOAP. But this tutorial is going to be about the NuSOAP libraries. You can get these libraries from:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nusoap/

First thing to do is to download this, and install into a directory that you can access. For different security reasons, it may be needed to keep these libraries outside of the accessible web directories.

The next step is to determine what needs to be required to get the data. This may include authentication and credentials, id’s, phrases, or anything else. It could be possible to not have anything required and just return all records. And that is the next step: determine what to expose. What type of information would you want to send back to the world? Hopefully it is not sensitive data, and only the data that needs to be exposed.

Now with that in mind, we are ready to go. I have set up a webservice server that has five different functions:

showPhrases – Phrases from Shakespeare plays that replace the names in the phrase with the passed in name/string
showTaxes – Calculates the tax based on the passed in price and state
showGroupItems – Shows what is needed based on a set event, all items are made up of course
showMadLib – Returns a mad lib based on passing in a number of different items
showNumbers – Returns a non associative array of numbers, requires an ID, and returns the numbers associated with that ID

Each of these functions provides a little more to view based on the webservice. The first and fourth functions will return a string of data. The second function returns an array with different data types. The third returns a complex type of a multidimensional array. I did this because there are many different tutorials out there using NuSOAP, but only seem to return a basic type and has very little to help when setting up the WSDL when it needs to be more complex. The fifth function demonstrates how to return a non associative array with the webservice in a complex type.

I will break down each function per post. But now we need a way that we can test these functions when we get them going. So the first thing to do is create a NuSOAP client to grab the exposed data. For the client, we will use the showTaxes example that has been created.

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Applications

GBP and Euro Symbols in Excel

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Have you used the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer PEAR package to output data to a spreadsheet? In this data that is being exported, have you needed to format the data? What about numbers, and then formatting further to a currency format. The currency formats for this data: one for Great British Pounds (£) and one for the Euro (€). The formatting needs to happen with those symbols. So here is the journey . . .

Since this post is not about the querying of the data, that is not going to be covered, but rather just the issues with formatting the currency symbols for Euro and GBP in the Writer. And since this is not about the Spreadsheet writer ins and outs, if you would like to know more about that, please see Package Information: Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer
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Applications, PHP

PEAR and CakePHP

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This post is about my experience with loading in PEAR to a CakePHP 1.2.x application. This may be the right way or the wrong way, but I got it to work throughout the application. I had to do some changes, and if there is a better way of doing this, please let me know.

First off, here is the issue. I needed to be able to export a group of records from the database to an excel spreadsheet. I have tried to use the Excel Spreadsheet add in that is listed on the Bakery. It works nice, and I had to do some modification for 1.2, but it worked. But not the way I wanted it. I have used the PEAR library Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer before and I like the type of control that I wanted, over the cells, the formatting, the merging, etc etc etc. It provides the type of control that I wanted. So here is what I did to get this to work with the CakePHP framework.

First, I have to download the PEAR library and the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer libraries to use. Since I use a local system to help develop, I could download these libraries to the local system and transport these over to the CakePHP application. So I went to PEAR site to get the libraries. To download these I ran the following commands:

pear install PEAR-1.8.1
pear install OLE-1.0.0RC1
pear install Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer-0.9.1

URL’s are listed below:
http://pear.php.net/package/PEAR/download
http://pear.php.net/package/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer/download
http://pear.php.net/package/OLE/download
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