Api to Api Comunication and data transformation - rest

Good day,
I want to communicate between two Web Api's, the first web api lets call Api1 not written by me and that api interacts with my data base to spit out information needed.
I have web api2 which would be written by me and why i have this is because my application needs data in certain kind of format (.dll) format.so api2 purpose is to get the information from api1 and then transform or package my data in a way that the my application would understand.
The question, is this possible?. can i use wrappers, so when i get my information from api1 then i wrap my information in the desired format before sending it off to the application. Does anyone have any other suggestions ?
Thank you in advance,

What you describe is possible but the requirements are too vague to give a useful answer.
The file extension doesn't really mean anything so not sure why you need .dll format for the message. I would use a standard format like Json or Xml. Or if using datawindow you could simply do saveas on sending side (or comma delimited, tab delimit) and file import on receiving end, so many options.
Too vague.
Async or Sync interface?
Files transferred via REST, OLE, DDE, or files written to location on server?
Are the files/data transferred specific to a logged in user?
How much data is being transferred, rows of information or configuration data? Answer will help in deciding on appropriate format & best method.
What type program is API #1 not in your control? That is important factor.

Related

How can I use my own api to other platforms?

I made a json api with using this => https://www.django-rest-framework.org/tutorial/quickstart/
All the articles I read teach the creation and use of api within its own platform, what I need is what I produce on the web, use it to in other platforms. I made my api but no idea about how to import it in other platforms..
so how can I use my own api in my c# windows form application or my flutter project
Any link, guide etc.
First of all you should be clear about why you need an api. If you need to transfer data from one system to another, pick a way that you know you can operate on both sides.
JSON or XML are just ways of representing data, first think about what you need and how can you transport that data between systems...After that the implementation should be clear.

Programmatic export/dump/mass data retrieval (BaaS)

Does anyone have experiences with programmatic exports of data in conjunction with BaaS providers like e.g. parse.com or StackMob?
I am aware that both providers (as far as I can tell from the marketing talk) offer a REST API which will allow for queries against the database, not only to be used by mobile clients but also by e.g. custom web apps.
I am also aware that both providers offer a manual export of data (parse.com via their web interface, StackMob via support).
But lets say I would like to dump all data nightly, so that I can import it into a reporting system for instance. Or maybe simply to have an up-to-date backup.
In this case, I would need a programmatic way to export/replicate the data stored in the backend. Manual exports are not an option for obvious reasons.
The REST APIs offered however seem to be designed for specific queries, not for mass reads (performance?). Let alone the pricing - I assume none of the providers would be happy about a nightly X Gigabyte data export via their REST API, so their probably will be a price tag.
I just couldn't find any specific information on this topic so far, so I was wondering if anyone else has already gone through this. Also, any suggestions on StackMob/parse alternatives are welcome, especially if related to the data export topic.
Cheers, Alex
Did you see the section of the Parse REST API on Batch operations? Batch operations reduce the number of API calls needed to grab data so that you are not using a call for every row you retrieve. Keep in mind that there is still a limit (the default is 100, but you can set it to a maximum of 1000). That means you are still limited to pulling down 1000 rows per API call.
I can't comment on StackMob because I haven't used it. At my present job, we are using Parse and we wrote a C# app which compares the data in a Parse class with a SQL table and pulls down any changes.

Getting only desired data from the web

I am working on web base application in ios.I want to get only the desired data from the web .
for e.g. If there is a site which showing the information of train code , train schedule, seat availability i want to get the data related to only seat availability from that web page and render it to my own table. Is it really possible ?
I am not an iOS developer, so I can't give you code on how to do it.
You'll be needing an HTML parser. The process is commonly called web/screen scraping. Have a read at this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3541965/459338
You can use a HTML Parser or use Regex to extract the pattern of the data that you want from the given url . However try to check whether the data provided by the website is copyrighted or not else you cannot use their data publicly via another interface without their permission.
Yes it is possible. For doing this you will be using the method of Parsing . Depending on the type of API you are getting whether it is JSON, XML or HTML etc , you can parse the desired data accordingly. You can check for the API's on the web for the type of information you would want to parse. Otherwise the database option is always there.

Getting data from remote sql table on iphone

I am a beginner at both iPhone programming and SQL, yet I have basic knowledge of them.
I am planning to do an application that would plot a graph from data taken from a database of the server of my company. I know how to plot, I know how to extract data from an sql table, but what I don't know is how to access the server.
So do I have to go through some kind of oracle-like application ?
This may seem like a very stupid question because it might not even be possible but any answer will be appreciated.
Thanks !
Go through a web service for example a PHP page that returns JSON (or XML, but JSON is easier to parse).
I can highly recommend this tutorial
Once you have your web service, you can use NSURLRequest/NSURLConnection to download the data and use a JSON framework to parse it. Or, if you're using XML you can use NSXMLParser.
See this apple code for more info on downloading using NSURLConnection.
The best way for this will be, using APIs at server end that handle the client request and perform database interaction, so transfer of data among device and server, take place through XMLs that will be secure as well as fast.
It is definitely possible to contact a server (I can't imagine what would happen without that!). What you are looking for is NSURLConnection. Have a look at the example provided by Apple.

Retrieving data from a remote database

could someone please explain to me the process of retrieving data from a remote database? I understand how to parse data from sqlite to an iPhone application however remote databases seem to be more complex. I tried to do research however i get confused about web services,clouds and other words that im not familiar with. So far i gathered that i need to use JSON to convert the data from the database into the appropriate format that is displayed on a php page? then the iPhone application connects to that page and retrieves the data?
Would someone be able to give me a brief explanation (also what database can be used with JSON? in this instance)? would me much appreciated (also if someone has any tutorials/articles about this would be grateful). Sorry if im totally wrong, trying to learn...
That are many ways to build a system where you have a client application that retrieves data from a "remote" system that runs a database. You have many many choices as to what the server runs, and what the client is... and there is a world of technologies involved in this...
Since you are interested in learning, I would suggest you to take into consideration a very common architecture for such systems and dig into it.
One such example is LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and you can find a good tutorial at this site.
The tutorial covers everything you need, from setting up the systems, to retrieving the data and passing it back though the web; it's step by step and pretty easy to follow. The only thing that is not covered is JSON, but JSON in the end is just a format to pass data back and forth, and you can easily learn the basics about it with this tutorial.
Finally, I would suggest looking at how building an iPhone app getting JSON data. This would be the point where you join the two previous tutorials.
If you have a web service protocol on the server side, you can use JSON based web service to retrieve your data. If you follow any JSON tutorial, you can see JSON is just a text representation of the data.
Or you can simply use a post request to your server, which can response by simple XML with your own defined tag. So that you can use NSXMLParser to parse the data in your iPhone and decode information from there.
Any kind of database in the remote site will work. I prefer the free open source MySQL database.
With JSON web servie, you need some JSON converter for your database in the server side and also in the client side. A good open source client tool is SBJSONParser.
But if you use XML, you can define your own tag to encode and decode you database fields and information.