I am somewhat new to programming, have some experience with VBA, but thats it. I am learning Filemaker at the moment and I am getting along quite nicely. I want to let FM automaticly enter certain appointments and reminders into my google calendar.
Now, I know that the calendar has an API, and I know that that API is the interface with which I can communicate with it. But I am lacking a step in my knowledge ladder, because the documentation is thoroughly confusing. I need to know what to use, in order to tell the calendar what to enter where. Is it like some compound url I construct? How do I login?
These are all questions that pop up. I don't expect you to answer those, but rather if you can point me to the right tutorials I can read to get this knowledge.
I hope I didn't burden you guys too much.
thx in advance
I'm one of the authors of Zulu, a product we built specifically to sync FileMaker to Google Calendar, using a bi-directional sync. You can also turn Zulu into your own CalDAV server if you want to go that route.
Good luck!
Don't take this wrong but you may be biting off too much. I have been programming for 30 years and it took me a couple of days to gather the information needed to interact with the Google APIs (the OAuth2 authentication can be really confusing at first).
My sugestion would be to look at importing calendars into Google Calendars using either CSV (https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/45656) or ICS (https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/45656) format. You should be able to generate those formats with a little bit of Filemaker scripting.
But since you asked:
You need the OAUTH2 offline access, with a refresh token you would
store somewhere.
You will use the refresh token to get an auth token
You will make requests using HTTPS GETS or POSTS (see the Calendar
API explorer), with the auth token in the Authorization header.
Since there is no Google Calendar API for FileMaker :-), you would
have to know some details of the HTTP protocol to send a properly
formatted request, you will be working at a lower level than you
would be if using a Python, Java or .NET library.
You will get back
JSON responses which you will have to parse.
There are a couple of ways you can try to do this quickly:
Use Zapier (http://zpr.io/VhK - affiliate link) to create a webhook, then use a hidden webviewer in FileMaker to create the event. Try this as an example: http://zpr.io/fqg7
Use a plug-in, like this one https://www.feedzon.com/products/fmgcal/. I've never used that particular one before, but it looks fairly straightforward.
If you want to go whole-hog, it is also possible to use scripts in FileMaker to write to the Google Calendar API, but it's a lot more work. The plugin is probably the easiest route to go.
If you don't want to use a plugin, I would recommend starting with a Zapier webhook, as it greatly simplifies the work needed to hook into the Google Calendar API.
Related
I want to host a clean, branded site that allows users to submit data which I will post process on some regular cadence and send custom emails based on data processing results. I can write code and have extensive experience with AWS, but am looking for the fastest solution.
Any experienced web developers have suggestions of which hosting solution to use? Wix, Squarespace, WordPress. I would prefer Squarespace but am not finding clear documentation stating I can create a form which writes to a database (I.e. DynamoDB, Redshift).
Any suggestions would be great! Thanks!
Having a good deal of experience with Squarespace, I will address the question "Is it possible to connect a Squarespace form to a third-party database and, if so, by what means?". While I won't address Wix or Wordpress, hopefully it will provide some objective answers and provide some help to your larger context/question.
Squarespace doesn't support any server-side code; it only supports supports the addition of HTML, CSS and Javascript within Code Injection, Code Blocks, and Developer Mode.
Therefore, your options are:
Send the data client-side with JavaScript. Write your own HTML form and insert it via code block, markdown block, of developer mode. Then write the corresponding JavaScript to send the data, on submit, to your external database. Alternatively, use a Squarespace form block, prevent the default submission from executing and use your own methods instead.
Connect the Squarespace form block to a Google Sheet and the sheet to the external DB via Apps Script. Once connected, use Apps Script (set to trigger when a row is added to the sheet) to obtain the submission from the sheet and send it to your external database (similar to this or this, but you'll be going "the other way", sending data to the external DB from Apps Script).
Use Zapier (or similar service) to bridge the gap, either using Squarespace's built-in integration or setting up Zapier on your own and setting the Zapier email address as the email recipient. You can use Zapier to send form submissions to a new item in DynamoDB, for example. It appears that, at a minimum, you'd have to pay for Zapier as that is a "Premium Integration". For Squarespace, if you were to use their built-in Zapier integration, you'll have to pay for a higher-cost plan (which could be avoided by using the email storage option instead, as mentioned previously).
I think you should choose WordPress, they have a huge documentation, a big community, you can get a ton of support from Wordpress's users when you run into a problem.
I'm creating my first application that requires me to update the app based on user input. I've been searching for the best way to send input to me. For example, I have a button that when the user presses I would like to send me the information they've added to a text field. Being new to this, I thought this could be done by simply sending the information to a specified email, but from what I've researched I will need some sort of database. Looking through the Apple Developer Documentation I don't even know which topic I should be looking at to figure this out, any help or direction would be very helpful!
You need to setup a server (using an API) to receive the information.
Usually you will use a webservice to receive the info from the app, although there are other ways to do that.
Sending an email through iOs would require the user to accept the email that is being sent, so doesn't look like a good idea.
Take a look at some options available to create webservices (django rest framework or flask), Google's Firebase also can be handy in this situation, since is only integrating it with your app and storing the data you want to store, with easy integration for Authentication and user tracking.
I am very new to Facebook applications and have very basic questions.
I use javascript SDK for my application, that loads friends' names and their profile pics.
How can I store this data into a MySQL database?
Since you want to store data in a databes you need to have the server process the information and put it there, thus a server script is required.
Most commonly people use php, so what you need to look at is how to get the data from facebook:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/php/
and then how to store the date you got from facebook:
http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_mysql_intro.asp
(you can do a google search there are loads of resources)
Keep the facebook guidelines on storing data in mind (not quite sure what they look like anymore)
Happy coding!
I'm working on a service that needs to be able to read items from users' calendars. It needs to work whether the user is using Google Calendar, Exchange, Hotmail/Live, iCal, etc...
I want to do this (effectively):
calendar = Login(emailaddress, password); // Works for #hotmail.com, #gmail.com...
// For every item in the users' calendar extract the location of the meeting
for each (item in calendar)
location = item.Location;
I figure someone must have built some code that abstracts away the varied ways you login to these services and access the objects. But I haven't found anything yet. Any pointers would be appreciated. I don't really care what it's written in (Ruby, Python, C#, Java) as long as I can wrap it.
UPDATE: I've been able to get something working against the Google Calendar using the Google Calendar API. In the process I came across CalDAV and the fact that Google, Yahoo, and Apple support it. I'm going to focus on CalDAV for now, and then probably plumb in Hotmail/Live and Exchange later. I really only need the calendar event times and location so this should not be too challenging.
UPDATE 2: I have discovered DDay.iCal. I'd like to use this as my top level abstraction within my app. But I still have not found anything that will help me connect to, and interact with each of the popular mail systems. Nor have I found any code that shows how to layer DDay.ICal over CalDAV (which, theoretically, would give me Google, Yahoo, and Apple). Anyone?
There is a calendar REST API for Hotmail which is available in beta form as part of the developer preview of the Live SDK. This is also a beta interactive SDK for the REST API which you can try out at http://beta.isdk.dev.live.com. Just try out the query "/me/calendars"
I'm looking at ways to secure the admin section of my (cakephp powered) Facebook application. To avoid duplicating functionality, I thought it'd be neat to allow access to people who have been flagged as developers in the app settings.
The question could then be: How do I determine whether a user of my Facebook application is a developer?
Alternatively: How do I obtain an array of developer user IDs for my Facebook app?
I tried looking for your answer myself, and the only thing I found that you could possibly do is to make a group private and invite-only to developers and then use the fb:if-is-group-member tag. http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:if-is-group-member
OK, so I found out how to do it by myself. Props to Samuel for giving me the idea.
Basically, the way to do it is to run an FQL query that establishes whether a user is an admin of the applications page (page_admin).
SELECT uid FROM page_admin WHERE uid = 286302657 AND page_id = 31290624157
In the PHP client, this returns an array for developers and an empty string for anyone else.
I decided to use the FQL rather than the API call because it is possible to preload the FQL to reduce calls to the Facebook servers.
Hope this is useful to somebody.