When creating certain objects on Shippo, there's this object_purpose attribute that allows you to select either QUOTE or PURCHASE. I can see that PURCHASE is for labels that are meant to be bought and used in the end, but when should I use QUOTE only?
It's fine to use PURCHASE for all your objects. Just remember, that a complete from / to address is required.
You should use QUOTE when you don't intend to actually buy a label - such as getting rates to show to a buyer or just doing a shipping estimate. The benefit of using QUOTE is that rates can be retrieved using less information (such as only passing the zip codes), since the the full street address is not required.
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I've been using the Android billing client for a while now and always display the prices using getPriceAmountInMicros() from the SkuDetails object returned from the billing client.
Often we get complains from some of the customers that the price we display is not the same price they're paying. I've always assumed this is due to local taxes and that the Google play Store doesn't return the prices with local taxes included.
However, going to the documentation of getPriceAmountInMicros() things start to get a bit fuzzy. In particular this section:
This value represents the localized, rounded price for a particular currency.
What is a "localized price"? Is this including taxes? I cannot find any explicit place where it says this includes taxes or that it doesn't. By contrast the documentation for getPrice() explicitly states that the price does not include taxes.
Looking into a completely different resource, yet connected to a sku, one can see the same method - getPriceAmountInMicros(). In this method, it's explicitly stated that the price does not include taxes. It would seem odd to me that they would choose to name the method in a SkyDetails object the same, but have different semantics. Nevertheless, I want to be sure and would highly appreciate your help!
Thanks for pointing this out.
Because the QPS of computing taxes during skuDetails queries would be high, our servers defer tax computation to the purchase flow. So unless you need getPriceAmountMicros() for, say, refunds; you should simply use getPrice().
Is there a known way to deal with users writing responses over multiple lines? - is it best to handle this case on the client level? as in checking if the user is still typing and have a delay between responses, or can this be handled on Watson somehow?
An example would be:
Bot:
What's Your Name?
User:
My name is
Nour
Those are two independent messages by the user over 2 lines.
It is best to always send the full "utterance" to Assistant in one request, because the processing does not work across multiple split calls to Assistant. Otherwise you would need to do some complex logic with context variables, or ask back the user their name if they uttered "my name is" without an actual name.
Generally the client side UI would wait for the user to press Enter before sending the utterance to Assistant. So you can be sure they have entered the full utterance.
But perhaps if they do utter "my name is" you could have an intent which checks for a name and an entity that extracts the name, and a dialog node which if the intent is found has a slot which ensures the entity is also found. In that way, if they do say "my name is" and no name, the bot will ask them for their name.
DSeager's approach is potentially the right way for the example you gave. The reason being is that within your overall question you have an entity.
What about where there is on real entity? For example:
Two Intents.
Pay my speeding fine
Pay my parking fine
Here you are using the intents to understand the answer without the need of an entity. Some will argue the Intent->Entity approach, but depending on your solution it can generally not scale as well versus just an intent answer.
So now your user enters the following:
How do I pay my
parking fine
Entity solution doesn't really work here as you have no context that they want to pay.
So one approach.
1. Send "How do I pay my" to WA. Assuming you have trained the system well it should come back with a low confidence or irrelevant.
2. Before you respond to the user, see if another utterance has been cached to send. If it has, then append with some kind of marker and send. For example:
How do I pay my !! parking fine
This will return the correct answer.
But wait a second, what if they do this?
How do I pay my parking fine?
Where do I pay it?
Both are valid questions, but the second one will fail and you can't append it to the previous.
In this instance, when an answer displays have it set a $anaphora context variable. Then if you get a low confidence/irrelevant response try reasking with the $anaphora value appended.
For example:
Q: How do I pay my parking fine?
A: <Answer> $anaphora = "parking fine"
Q: Where do I pay it?
A: <Irrelevant>
Q: parking fine !! Where do I pay it?
Both of these require some work at the application layer.
I'm working on this kind of data structure :
Now, say I have to search for products that are < 90 EUR, it should only returns the product "item2". On the other hand, if I search for products that are == 100 EUR, I should only returns the product "item1".
I have 60 000 products and 16 currencies, so I just can't convert all products in all currencies on a daily basis (as the currency rates updates daily) only to be able to perform this search.
I have 2 questions :
is this use case a good fit for a Postgres function ? Is there any other good and sustainable solution if not ?
if a postgres function is the solution. Given that I'm using Ruby on Rails (4.2) and the search requests (on products sizes, colors etc...) are chained using ActiveRecord : is the call to the DB function still chainable and usable in AR ?
Thanks for your help
Using a function for this is a terrible idea, because performance will suffer greatly: the exchange rates will change over time, rendering your indexes useless.
Further, it's a terrible idea to store a single price per item. Thing psychological prices and tax considerations: if something is €99.99 including VAT in the Eurozone, it'll probably make sense to sell it for $99.99 plus sales tax in the US. No amount of exchange rate manipulation using functions or other will change that. (Compare the prices of Apple in the US, in France, in the UK, etc.).
For each item, associate a price in Euros, one in Dollars, etc. -- each with a currency_id, and have the exchange rates reside in a separate table. Or create some kind of price-list table in which you associate prices based on currency (e.g. €99 = $99) to a price_id, and associate the products (it's actually the SKU, btw) to their corresponding price_id.
You can fill this data in semi-automatically using an exchange rate table, and periodically update them using one as well. But really: do reserve the ability to manually set prices, make sure you mark prices as including or excluding tax. And when it comes to taxes, don't forget that tax rates are different from a place to the next and from a product to the next.
For the record, I ended up creating a new column "price_eur" in the "products" table where I convert each price to EUR whatever is the original currency. Doing so I can perform a consistent search based on this price_eur column.
I just wanted to know if there was an alternative solution but looks like there is no other simple way...
In my application it's possible to store a price for every object and the user can also choose its preferred currency.
What is the best way to store and manage number with currency in iPhone SDK?
More infos about my app:
It uses Core Data.
Number that can be stored must be of type xxx.xx (e.g. 100.00).
How can I sort these numbers ascending or descending?
What kind of attribute I must set in my entity to store a number like this?
Have you got links, docs, source or guides to show me examples? I never user number with currency, then I've got some problems with them :)
Thanks a lot,
Matthew
Store it in GP (gold pieces) with a conversion factor ;)
It doesn't look like there's a datatype for currency, so storing the number and decimal part, and a setting for the current currency, is probably as good as you're going to get. See this: HowTo for newbie: Managing currency in iPhone app
I need to get the index of a exchange like NASDAQ rather than the price of a specific stock in that exchange. I suppose that Finance::Quote will come to the rescue , but after a quick go-through of the document, I find it the way one can use the module for query is like:
%info = $q->fetch("australia","CML")
which means both the exchange and the stock should be specified in the query. then the question is: does the index itself can be treated as a stock and has a symbol name which can be used in the query?
Of course, if you have other way can meet my needs rather than using Finance::Quote, please feel free to write down your solution.
The problem with your question is that you are assuming that there is just one index for a particular exchange. Whilst there may well be a particular index that is dominant (eg. for stocks primarily traded on the London Stock Exchange, the FTSE 100 might be considered the main index; similarly for the NYSE it would be the Dow Jones Industrial Average) other exchanges may have a less clear leader in their collection of associated indicies (eg. for the Australian Stock Exchange, the S&P/ASX 200 and the All Ordinaries index are both frequently quoted side-by-side in the evening broadcast news).
Symbology of stocks, indicies, option chains, futures, etc is quite a complicated field in financial IT. Many of the symbology standards are backed by a data vendor (eg. Reuters, Bloomberg) and use of their standards requires a commercial license. On the other hand there are other efforts aiming to make symbology more open (Bloomberg themselves are behind one of these efforts).
I'm not familiar with the data sources of the Finance::Quote package you reference, but if you are serious about accessing market data (ie. prepared to pay for it) but don't need the cost/complexity/speed of a solution from Reuters, Bloomberg, etc, you could do alot worse than check out what Xignite offers in the way of market data accessible via web services.
the symbol for the nasdaq composite is "^IXIC". For nyse composite it's "^NYA".
each quote provider might have a different syntax though.