I am using the GA Data Export API to interact with Google Analytics and I'm making a lot of progress, I am using this URL Endpoint initially to pull all the profiles under an account:
https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/accounts/default
This URL retrieves each GA ID (profile) and each UA. One thing I've realized is one account can contain multiple UAs and when this happens, this request pulls all profiles. We have a client who has about 115 profiles under like 10 different UAs, and the request takes about 30 seconds for the initial request (and then I believe it must be cached, because it speeds up considerably after this, but then the next day the same thing occurs).
Is there a way to get a list of UA's without pulling the profiles? This way I can query the UA specifically for the profiles instead of pulling each one.
Any advice on this would be really helpful!
Thanks
UPDATE: Here's some documentation on the specific call I am using right now:
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataReferenceAccountFeed.html
UPDATE 1: I have found some interesting information in the docs
Once your application has verified
that the user has Analytics access,
its next step is to find out which
Analytics accounts the user has access
to. Remember, users can have access to
many different accounts, and within
them, many different profiles. For
this reason, your application cannot
access any report information without
first requesting the list of accounts
available to the user. The resulting
accounts feed returns that list, but
most importantly, the list also
contains the account profiles that the
user can view.
So this means that you have to use the default accounts call to get these back? Surely, somebody has had this issue before?
So apparently, you can query the account if you know the UA-ID, however there is no way to get back a list of only UA IDs.
One way you can do it is have the user enter their own UA ID instead of having them choose one; not as user-friendly as it could be but better than making the user wait 30 seconds!
Related
I'm a client side developer with little experience of server side, and I'm struggling to understand how to make a database-backed website without requiring users to login.
The usecase is fairly straightforward. The user lands on a website, uploads an image, and performs some processing to that image. Clicking 'share' POSTs JSON to my endpoint, stores it in a DB, and returns a unique URL in a textbox (eg, https://example.com/art/12345) which allows the user to share their artwork with others, or just to come back and do more editing later on.
What stops somebody from doing, POST <data> https://example.com/art 100 million times and filling my pay-as-you-go database?
I've seen examples of this link based method of sharing between users on plenty of sites but I don't understand how to stop abuse, or whether it is safe to just open up an API which allows writes to a database. I do not want users to have to login.
I believe the simplest method is having a quota, either by username for logged in users or by IP, if you don't require logins or only want to allow free usage to a certain point. Perhaps you could have a smaller quota for non-logged in users than for logged in users and even larger for paying users.
Your server side code that handles the POSTS and storing data into the database would have to take care of that. I'd add it to a user_data table on mine, making an additional column that tracks total space used. makes a todo
Then, when the user adds new data, increase the total space used. When they delete old data (I have versioned web pages so that eventually, the user will be able to rollback to previous versions) then the space used decreases. Having another page to look at to see where they're using space makes deciding what to delete to stay under a quota of X MB's/GB's/TB's/etc easier or maybe just an /api/delete_old_pages or notes or comments or all of the above.
It appears there was a big update to the facebook api a year ago and a lot of the info online is inaccurate because of it. I'm trying to create a website that provides additional function for members of a specific facebook group; if a user is not part of a specific group I don't want them in it. Some groups may have more than 5k users but if I have to settle for less, so be it. I'm using the php sdk and have successfully made an initial api call with general user information.
Administrators of the group WILL be able to log in, but apparently Facebook isn't approving the "user_groups" permission (?) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31171082/check-if-user-is-a-member-of-a-specific-group-using-facebooks-javascript-sdk
I found this but I'm not sure how to make it work. Facebook Graph - Possible To Check If A User Is A Member Of A Group w/o user_groups?
I'm using the graph api explorer and I can get a partial list of the groups I'm in but it's nowhere near complete (it displays 4 out of like 20). My thought was that if I can get a full list of members in a group that I could just do an [if user is in userlist then]
What would you do here?
As far as I understand there is no way to do this without some caveat where it won't work (when you have more then 5k members). It also causes you to create a copy of the members list, instead of when a user wants to access the group.
I've been exploring ways that it might be possible to promote the business of a friend of mine. One of these ways is by encouraging users to check in to his business, the incentive for this being that they go into the draw to win some kind of prize.
I've been trying to find if the code for this already exists but I might be looking in the wrong places. If it doesn't what would be the best way to do it using the graph APIs.
Thanks.
You can use Facebook app to check-in to your page/business.
All page check-ins can be fetched using following request by your code
https://graph.facebook.com/PAGE_ID/checkins?access_token=PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN
If you want to get only specific time period check-ins use since and until params in query.
You have to parse the json response and store in an array and randomly select the winner.
you can contact the winner using their facebook id and send them a message.
You will have to write the code yourself, but it would essentially work like this:
Get the user to allow access to the "Raffle" application and get their email address and permissions to look at their check-ins. Email is required to contact the winner.
Use a scheduled script (cronjob) to periodically check if the user has checked-in anywhere (in particular, the business you want to promote).
Award a raffle ticket for each unique check-in within a 24 hour period.
Hold a draw between all the users who checked in on that day or week and award the prize to someone randomly.
Pretty simple flow, but complex code.
I would like to capture the following parameters:
lastAccessedTime - The time when the user visited the site the last time (usually shown during the login process)
isOnline - A boolean to represent if a user is online or not.
a. Would it make sense to have these variables as part of the User table itself or should this be handled via a separate user audit table?
b. If certain SOAP / REST API's expose the functionality via API calls, how do you track the above parameters (e.g. Would you modify the lastAccessedTime in such cases - this might confuse the user if he logs into the portal, isOnline bit also will not make sense if the user does API calls).
I would create a session table that links back to the user. Instead of an isOnline field, I would just run a query for sessions that have been active within the last x amount of time. I would also update that session field with each request, even if that request is coming through an API.
This does create some overhead in pruning the session table, but you also don't clutter up your user table with non-user information, which can't be pruned.
Make the lastTimeActive a field in the user table, and update it with each page access. Your "Users Online" list is all users whose lastTimeActive is within 5 minutes.
I would create another table (userid, lastTimeActive), and frequently update & check the table.
// update
update onlineusers set lastTimeActive = getdate() where userid=1234
// check
delete from onlineusers where lastTimeActive < dateadd(minute,-5,getdate())
The biggest problem with tracking user presence (onine/offline) over HTTP is how to determine when the user has gone offline.
It's easy to determine when the user has come online - the mere presence of an authenticated request assumes that the user is active. However, since HTTP is stateless, the lack of a subsequent request can mean either that the user is gone offline, or that the user is online, but just hasn't done anything specific with your app recently.
Thus the best guess you can make is to have a timeout and if the user has not made a request during that timeout, to switch to offline state.
The simplest implementation would be to have a lastTimeActive, as Jonathan Sampson suggested. However, this won't give you the length of the user session, only an approximation of who's online at this moment.
More complex approach would be to have lastTimeActive and lastTimeLoggedIn. LastTimeLoggedIn is set at the time of first auth request that is more than 5 minutes from a previous auth request. A user is considered online, if there was an authenticated request in the last five minutes. The session length for the user is the time difference between lastTimeActive and lastTimeLoggedIn.
If your app also offers the choice of logging out to the user, you chouls consider that action also as going offline. However, unless your app is a banking app, chances are the users will just close their browser.
Also, avoid any background threads for updating the offline/online status of your users. You should be running the logic above only when there's an explicit request about the status of particular user and you should be updating only the users you were asked for.
How do you get the total number of users in a Google Apps Domain? I'm aware of the "Retrieve All Users in Domain" call using the Google Provisioning API, but I'd rather not execute such an intensive call just to count up all the users. Is there a simpler way to do this?
I found a solution that isn't as resource-heavy as retrieving all users: The Google Reporting API can be used to get the total number of accounts in a Google Apps domain.
The Google Apps Admin Settings API allows you to retrieve both the current and maximum number of users in the domain:
https://developers.google.com/google-apps/admin-settings/#retrieving_the_current_number_of_users_in_a_domain
this would be preferable to the reports API as it's both lower in traffic and it's closer to real time (reports are only updated every 24 hours so it won't take into account users recently added).
You could try "Retrieve All Nicknames in Domain" which could save some bandwidth as it hopefully really only retrieves the nicknames, although I think this won't get you the exact count because "Retrieve All Nicknames for a User" seems to imply that a user can have multiple nicknames.
If you've got some test domain, also assure that retrieving all users really is too much overhead and keep in mind that depending on what you want to do, you can perhaps build some kind of cache around it that only does a full request after the cache is older than X.