I'm currently looking at building a lightweight integration between PivotalTracker and Salesforce.com. Reviewing this bit of PT documentation, it looks like I can do an update of Salesforce data based on PT activity. Awesome! I can't figure out how to access the XML data that is being posted however.
I can't see anything in ApexPages.CurrentPage() that looks like it will let me get to the XML. Has anyone done anything like this, without the use of an intermediate server?
I think we chatted about this over Twitter last week.
AFAIK there is (somewhat annoyingly) no way to access raw (i.e. not form posted key/values) POST data via SFDC. The Apex REST service support would be the closest thing, but requires authentication and still may not do exactly what you want.
Fairly certain you'll need some sort of middle-man proxy that simply takes the XML data and posts it to VF as a form-encoded key/value pair. That is a fairly trivial thing to do, but it's an unnecessary additional moving part and will require some sort of server resource.
I would probably first investigate if PT supports any other ping mechanism, or a way to write a custom extension to convert the raw POST into a form POST.
Related
We are trying to implement in page editing for our cake app. We would like to use create.js for the frontend and createphp to handle the connection between create.js and cakephp. I have been doing a lot of research on RDFa and I am generally baffled by how all this links together.
What I have:
Editable interface
Endpoints via actions in cakephp
What I need:
A way to convert the data sent by create.js to my database structure and a way to send data to create.js for rendering.
I have gotten to the point in createphp where you are supposed to create your own mapper. I don't know what the mapper should contain. It mentions that is has built-in mappers (Midgard\CreatePHP\Mapper ?) but I don't know how to load those either.
I have read the documentation but it doesn't give details on how to accomplish these tasks.
Thank you for your help on the two following questions.
1. How can I convert my data from create.js to cake and then back again for the views? (possible solution createPHP but doesn't have to be)
2. How do I create a mapper for createPHP or where could I find information to learn how to create a mapper for my instance?
Yeah, the documentation is unfortunately rather sparse. I will create an issue on createphp linking to this post, to give some hints how the documentation could be improved.
I try to explain how things work:
To convert the data from the REST call to your model, you indeed need a RdfMapper instance. See the setup section of the tutorial how you bootstrap that. the bundle comes with mappers for doctrine, which you can read for inspiration if you do not use doctrine. I recommend to extend AbstractRdfMapper in that case.
To render the rdfa, you need to configure what fields of your class should be what rdf type. You can either use the array mapper as in the tutorial, or use the xml mapping, or your own RdfDriver
The whole process is working fine in the symfony2 CreateBundle.
From what I've read so far, it seems like the only way for me to map custom data points from my own dataset is to host that data with MapQuest. Am I correct in that or have I just not read deep enough?
And if it's possible, does anyone have a link to more information about how to go about it? Their API documentation is subpar.
Thanks :)
Disclaimer: I work at MapQuest
While the MapQuest Data Manager makes it easy to store custom data with MapQuest so that you can query it through the Search API, you don't have to store data with us in order to show custom points on a map.
Are you trying to do something along the lines of storing data in MySQL or PostgreSQL and then use something like PHP to query your own database, loop through the results, and then show the results on a MapQuest map using the JavaScript API? Unfortunately I don't have any easy/quick examples that show how to do that, but it is possible.
The forums on the Developer Network are also good place to look to see if others have had issues similar to the one that you are facing.
Also, let me know exactly which MapQuest APIs/tools you are using and I will do my best to provide more information depending on what you need.
I'm stumped and need some ideas on how to do this or even whether it can be done at all.
I have a client who would like to build a website tailored to English-speaking travelers in a specific country (Thailand, in this case). The different modes of transportation (bus & train) have good web sites for providing their respective information. And both are very static in terms of the data they present (the schedules rarely change). Here's one of the sites I would need to get info from: train schedules The client wants to provide users the ability to search for a beginning and end location and determine, using the external website's information, how they can best get there, being provided a route with schedule times for the different modes of chosen transport.
Now, in my limited experience, I would think the way to do that would be to retrieve the original schedule info from the external site's server (via API or some other means) and retain the info in a database, which can be queried as needed. Our first thought was to contact the respective authorities to determine how/if this can be done, but this has proven to be problematic due to the language barrier, mainly.
My client suggested what is basically "screen scraping", but that sounds like it would be complicated at best, downloading the web page(s) and filtering through the HTML for relevant/necessary data to put into the database. My worry is that the info on these mainly static sites is so static, that the data isn't even kept in a database to build the page and the web page itself is updated (hard-coded) when something changes.
I could really use some help and suggestions here. Thanks!
Screen scraping is always problematic IMO as you are at the mercy of the person who wrote the page. If the content is static, then I think it would be easier to copy the data manually to your database. If you wanted to keep up to date with changes, you could then snapshot the page when you transcribe the info and run a job to periodically check whether the page has changed from the snapshot. When it does, it sends an email for you to update it.
The above method could also be used in conjunction with some sort of screen scaper which could fall back to a manual process if the page changes too drastically.
Ultimately, it is a case of how much effort (cost) is your client willing to bear for accuracy
I have done this for the following site: http://www.buscatchers.com/ so it's definitely more than doable! A key feature of a web scraping solution for travel sites is that it must send you emails if anything went wrong during the scraping process. On the site, I use a two day window so that I have two days to fix the code if the design changes. Only once or twice have I had to change my code, and it's very easy to do.
As for some examples. There is some simplified source code here: http://www.buscatchers.com/about/guide. The full source code for the project is here: https://github.com/nicodjimenez/bus_catchers. This should give you some ideas on how to get started.
I can tell that the data is dynamic, it's to well structured. It's not hard for someone who is familiar with xpath to scrape this site.
I am developing a basic yet highly customized CRM for a small training centre which has the ability to store student records and also send emails to them. I'm using SwiftMailer following this excellent tutorial in CakePHP to accomplish the sending part.
Of course, students are sometimes going to reply to emails and I'd like to retrieve them within my CRM and store them along with the student record.
However, I cannot find a single reference to doing this. I've tried the following Google searches: "receiving email cakephp" , "retrieving email cakephp" and even "email client cakephp" but all of these queries give results relating to sending mail rather than receiving it -- very frustrating!
Finally, I broadened my search to non-cake solutions and found someone recommending a library called ezComponents. It doesn't seem to have had any active development for about a year, but it includes an email receiving class which is exactly what I want. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to add this to CakePHP and the only post I've been able to find on the entire web on the matter doesn't exactly go into much detail. It's certainly not a step-by-step tutorial on using ezComponents on CakePHP like the SwiftMailer tutorial I mentioned above.
I also found a class on Google Code called php-imap which looks like it would do the job but, again, I haven't the slightest clue how to get it working happily in Cake like SwiftMailer is.
I realize that I may have to learn how to package classes for use in Cake by myself but I'm asking this question first on the off-chance that there is already a Cake-friendly solution to this problem that I just haven't realized :-)
Joseph
Thanks to everyone for your answers, but I've been doing some more searching and it looks like the solution is actually incredibly simple.
Basically, with the help of a plugin, I can set up the mail server in databases.php as a datasource and then write a Model and Controller to interact with it.
Here's the example I found: https://github.com/kvz/cakephp-emails-plugin
Edit: the repo has been deprecated and is now available at https://github.com/kvz/deprecated/tree/cakephp-emails-plugin
You will want to pipe your email to PHP and use stdin:// to read the contents of the email and add the e-mail to your database.
I've done this with cake and the simplest way is to make a Cake console application to handle the parsing. Also using cpanel's account level filtering to generate the pipe is really simple.
http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/piping-mail-php-scripts-howto-checklist-50985.html
http://www.evolt.org/incoming_mail_and_php
Sounds like you want to include SwiftMailer as a Cake plugin, amirite?
http://book.cakephp.org/view/1111/Plugins
-- if you want to package it yourself. Otherwise, a cursory search of the Bakery yielded this result:
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/sky_l3ppard/2009/11/07/updated-swiftmailer-4-xx-component-with-attachments-and-plugins
Hopefully it will at least get you pointed in the right direction. HTH. :)
How would one create a REST web service to write a row into a databse table. Use the follwoing scenario:
The table is called Customer - the
data to be inserted into the row would
be the name, addresss, telephone
number, email.
I think its impossible to describe the whole thing end to end in Java or C#, and I would never expect that, but here are the questions I have popping into my head as I prepare for coding:
How the URI would look (eg. if you use this URL - http://www.example.com/)?
What info would go into the HTTP envelope?
Would I use POST when writing to the database in this way?
Do I use a resource to store the posted data from the client? Is this even necessary if the data is being written to a database anyway?
When the data to be writeen into the db is recieved by the server - how do I physically insert it into the database - do I call some method on the server to actually write the data (in Java)? - this doesn't seem to fit with truely REST architecture - shunning RPC calls.
Should I even be bothering writing to a DB - should I be storing my data as a resource?
As you can see I need a few issues clearing in my head. Any help much appreciated.
First of all, I'm not either java nor c# expert and I don't exactly know what means do these languages have to support REST design, but in general:
http://www.example.com/customers - customers is a collection of resources and you want to add a new resource to this collection
It depends on various things - you should probably set the content-type header (according to the data format in which you are sending the representation) and set some authentication headers if you need it.
Yes, you always use POST to create a new entry in a collection of resources.
I don't fully understand this question, to be honest. What do you mean by "inmediately writing data into the database"?
REST is primarily just a style of communication between server and a client. It doesn't say anything about how you should handle the data received by using it. The usual way how modern web approaches (MVC style frameworks) solve it, is by routing every REST action to a method of some class (usually a controller instance) where you handle the received parameters (eg. save them to the database) and generate a response to be sent back.
For a very brief and very clear introduction to REST have a look at this short video.
RESTful Web Services, published by O'Reilly and Associates, seems to fit the bill you're looking for.
As far as doing it in Java, Sun has a page on it.