My house has an home automation system from the 1960's that I have managed to tap into. I've been able to setup an interface which allows me to write adapters for various technologies such as Node Red, Alexa, and now Google Assistent.
Given that this will only ever work with my house, I see no reason to make public Smart Home Actions. On Alexa's side, I can let these services stay in a Development state indefinitely which has worked great for the last 6 months. On Google's side, however, the FAQ says (https://developers.google.com/actions/smarthome/faq):
Q: How often do I need to run gactions test?
A: gactions test needs be refreshed every 3 days. After 3 days the test agent will disappear from mobile-HomeControl settings. If you run into this, just run gaction test again.
Therefore, I was wondering what they best way is to make a PERSONAL Google Actions service? Of course, the obvious method would be to script and schedule the gactions call to keep testing alive but I would hope there was a better way to support this!
Additional details: I'm using Amazon's OAuth service for sign-in. This way, I can validate the Amazon ClientID, UserID, etc. through the AccesssToken Google passes in for authorization. Therefore, I could theoretically run this publicly without any issues but I would need to figure out how Google could review it for testing purposes! I don't need some Google employee turning on and off my lights while the Google Maps car drive by to verify the change... ;)
I would just use a script to call gaction periodically.
Publishing it would unnecessarily pollute the Actions directory. Also, they'll make you jump through hoops for "brand verification" and other restrictions they have for naming invocation terms.
If you did publish it, you give them a temporary account for verification purposes and disable the account when published. They would be randomly controlling the lights during the verification period though which can be up to a week!
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I have built a google actions project and published it. It has a web hook that is linked to a Google Functions with an actions sdk code behind it. Everything works fine.
However, I have noticed that there is a continuous user (with the same userId provided by the intent) that keeps access the function (guessing via the actions project). I am keeping a kind of sessions log and it keeps creating a session almost every 3-4 seconds.
Since the project is just some temporary demo of content and not really shared with the world at large, I am wondering what or who is causing this continuous access. It looks almost like some heart-beat type of check being done. Hence the question: is it something that Google does to know whether the action project is live or not? Thanks
Every 3-4 seconds seems high, but if you have published an Action that has gone through the review process Google does run a health check against it every few minutes.
Due to hardware restrictions, we are unable to retrieve the current status of many of our lights (their color/brightness/etc.).
In the QA test cases spreadsheet found here, at the bottom under Deploying, a number of QUERY intents are listed to be tested. Does this mean our Smart Home application will not be able to pass certification?
Thank you for reading.
There is some expectation from the user to know the status of your their house at any time. If you cannot retrieve the state directly from devices, you should be able to use your cloud provider to store a virtual equivalent of the device. Then instead of querying the device directly you can return the state of the virtual device.
If anything, just try to be honest with the review team and they will keep certain limitations in mind.
When submitting for review make sure you provide them with a perfectly working test environment. So if some of your lights don't function like you want them to and you can't get their info, don't provide them for testing.
I'm not familiar with the review process of Smart Home applications but if you provide the review team with the right information of which hardware is and isn't supported I'm sure they won't straight up reject your application for it.
I'm kinda lost here at http://payments-sandbox.amazon.com/
I want to set up the test user for Amazon FPS which will be used by my Behat-based web acceptance tests.
The documentation states that it's possible. However, as Amazon constantly requires you to re-authorize yourself almost on every page change, I don't understand where the page to create a test account is.
So, does anyone have a personal experience with setting up a test account to autotest the application which uses FPS for purchases? How it's done and where? I prefer to not register a completely imaginary person along with fake SSN and phone number just for test suite. Or I'm out of luck here?
We have a few servers that have different roles. For instance, we have production servers, and testing/staging servers. We have a few end users who forget to switch paths to production once things are tested and approved or use; They use the new paths for a bit, then revert back to using the testing/staging at some point for some reason that we can't understand other than stupidity. We still want to be able to get a glimpse into our staging environment after pushing a build into production, but we want to stop them from being able to still hit those servers/services.
We are now pondering some solutions to this problem. One being never give them the direct staging url. An idea would be to create a virtual directory or have a set of domain aliases that we could give them and then shut down while still allowing us access to these endpoints. We could restrict our main staging domain to the office ip range so they never have direct access and call it good.
Does this sound like a good solution? Is our process wrong, are there better routes?
I am interested in solutions for websites as well as web services where visuals can't be used effectively.
We've run into this at my work as well… quite recently in fact. One thing that I thought about other than the virtual directory was setting up specific ports for them to test on then either take the ports down or change them for our internal uses only.
Well without details in how your application is deployed it could be troublesome to give concrete examples. One wonderful solution is to get better users :P Perhaps a more possible solution however is to let your production boxes move a certain set of users(as decided in your code) to your test/staging systems. I.E. the User always connects to Production, but the production machines at connect/auth time, may decide these people are too cool for production let them run the test/staging code instead.
It's not a fullproof method of course, but it works for many many websites to let a certain set of users into different parts of their codebase.
I don't know how feasible this would be for you, but it's a possibility perhaps.
I find that users sometimes have difficulties with URLs, and don't like to have subtle changes like port number in the address.
The best approach I've found is to have the application tell the user what environment they are in.
For example, my teams have used absolutely positioned headers or footers, color coded for Dev/Staging environments that show the application version number with an alpha/beta tag, along with a message that says "Work done on this site will be lost, use Production (link) to keep your work." Typically we make the Dev area red, and the staging area yellow. We also like to put a link to the bug tracking system right in this area.
On production there is not usually a region like this. However, we do sometimes provide positive reinforcement by placing a green region, with the app version and a Production tag in it, and then fade the green region away after a few seconds. This helps keep the app front and center, but let's the user know they are in the right place.
I want to write a workflow application that routes a link to a document. The routing is based upon machines not users because I don't know who will ever be at a given post. For example, I have a form. It is initially filled out in location A. I now want it to go to location B and have them fill out the rest. Finally, it goes to location C where a supervisor will approve it.
None of these locations has a known user. That is I don't know who it will be. I only know that whomever it is is authorized (they are assigned to the workstation and are approved to be there.)
Will Microsoft Windows Workflow do this or do I need to build my own workflow based on SQL Server, IP Addresses, and so forth?
Also, How would the user at a workstation be notified a document had been sent to their machine?
Thanks for any help.
I think if I was approaching this problem workflow would work to do it. It is a state machine you want that has three states:
A Start
B Completing
C Approving
However workflow needs to work in one central place (trust me on this, you only want to have one workflow run time running at once, otherwise the same bit of work can be done multiple times see our questions on MSDN forum). So a central server running the workflow is the answer.
How you present this to the users can be done in multiple ways. Dave suggested using an ASP.NET site to identify the machines that are doing the work, which is probably how I would do it. However you could also write a windows forms client that would do the same thing. This would require using something like SOAP / WCF to facilitate communication between client form applications and the central workflow service. This would have the advantage that you could use a system try icon to alert the user.
You might also want to look at human workflow engines, as they are designed to do things such as this (and more), I'm most familiar with PNMsoft's Sequence
You can design a generic "routing" workflow that will cause data to go to a workstation. The easiest way to do this would be to embed the workflow in an ASP.NET application. Each workstation should visit the application with a workstation ID in the querystring:
http://myapp/default.aspx?wid=01
When the form is filled out at workstation A, the workflow running in the web app can enter it into the "work bin" of the next workstation. Anyone sitting at the computer for which the form is destined will see it appear in their list of forms to review. You can use AJAX to make it slick and auto-updating.