I would like to know how it is possible to extract information from a website (http://www.bcentral.cl) using ABAP. Is it possible?
I have little experience in ABAP and I would not know where to start. After obtaining the information I must update ABAP table with those values. Here is the info I need to take out of the website.
It doesn't work like this, like you intend to do it. Parsing text from web-page directly in ABAP is possible, but cumbersome and inefficient.
Usually currency rates and other indicators are consumed via web-services/XML, that are provided by financial institutions, and Banco Central de Chile is not an exclusion.
Here is the page where they explain how to use their web-services, and even provides an example (real example, Karl!) how to consume this web-service in your application.
Consuming web-service in ABAP is not as much complicated than in C#. Here is the step-by-step guide:
https://blogs.sap.com/2013/07/29/consuming-webservices-directly-from-abap/
Related
When I am looking into approach's used for the development of API's, I came across multiple approaches like Code-First, API-First, Design-API-First.
I clearly understand Code-First approach how it is different from other two. But I am not able to get the exact difference between API-First and Design-First approach.
Summary from links:
API First:
API's are considered as first class citizens by the organization.
You design each of your APIs around a contract written in an API
description language like Open API for consistency, reusability, and broad
interoperability.
Design-API-First:
Describing every API design in an iterative way that both humans and computers can understand before you write any code.
API design-first is about the process of creating the API itself.
In design API first approach there will be lot of collaboration in designing of the API.
My understanding by far:
I feel 1 and 2 points of Design-API-First is saying same thing as API First because for example Open API specification is understood by both humans and computers. Is there anything more to it?
So, the only difference there will be collaboration added here by involving stakeholders, developers, customers etc?
So, when we use Design API First, we can say we are also using API-First?
References:
Probably I am able to get the exact context from the following links,
please use them and see if you can get the right understand of it and
address this question.
https://blog.stoplight.io/api-first-vs.-api-design-first-a-comprehensive-guide
https://blog.axway.com/product-insights/amplify-platform/application-integration/api-first-design-api-first
https://www.ecosmob.com/design-first-or-api-first-where-does-future-lies/
I feel like this is a simple enough thing to do and can't believe how hard of a time I'm having finding the example I need so alas, human help please! You failed me Google :)
FYI I've written a bit of code in my life (Java, C, ASM, PHP), new to APIs.
As the title lays bare, I want to retrieve info (tickets out of our ticketing system meeting certain conditions) via a GET request, loop through each ticket, and update each one (PUT) based on certain conditions.
If there's a tutorial you know of that covers that, please point me to it! If not, if you could please fill in some of these holes?
I wound up in Postman, is this an appropriate environment to accomplish such? Of course you can make individual API calls here but I got lost trying to string the aforementioned sequence together. Is it possible via "Create API?" This makes it sound like I'm creating my own API server for other users to access data from. If it is possible via "Create API," where's the dang run code button?! If not Postman, what tool should I be using to write code in? And again, if you have any code samples/videos closely resembling said scenario for that tool.
Thank you for any assistance you can offer.
Cheers,
Jay
You want to interact with your ticketing system: read existing tickets, and update them. Correct?
To do this, your TICKETING SYSTEM must have an "api" (possibly - but not necessarily - a REST API).
If it does, you might be in luck. But you need to learn the API first, possibly from product documentation. If it doesn't, there's probably not much you can do except to interact with the system as a "normal user".
If it has an API, and if it's a relatively simple API (like REST), you can use the API manually (e.g. through POSTMAN), or you can use it programmatically (using Python, C#, Java or just about any programming language you feel comfortable with).
In summary, you need to:
Determine if your ticketing system provides any kind of web api
If so, get the API details
If at that point you want proceed, determine what programming language or framework you'd like to use.
Hopefully that gives you a bit of "direction".
Everyone. Recently Google Translate Is Integrated Into My Project, Which Plays The Role Of Translating Some Product Names, Product Descriptions, Product Related Category Names. But Cause There Are Plenty Of Products In My Database(And Increased Quickly), Google Translate Api Would Cost Considerable Money.
I Want To Translate By Google As Less As Possible. In The Translation, Many Words Are Same Among Many Products, For Example : 阿迪达斯 - Adidas, 苹果 - iphone, 篮球 - Basketball, Bla Bla..... I Wanna Do Some Tricks, But Find No Idea.
Did Anyone Encounter Such Questions?
Any Help Would Be Appreciated.
It sounds like what you need is actually the ability to reuse translation at the string or substring level (in other words, per database entry). You can't really do that with Google, that I know of. You've got a few options, as I see it:
You could switch over to Microsoft Translator and use their methods
that allow you to place translations yourself, such as their
Collaborative Translation feature that lets you override the MT with
a preferred translation and even to vote translations up/down. Quality here will be broadly comparable to Google (I often find it better), and you have methods at your disposal that allow this override. Also, unlike Google, the Microsoft API is free up to a certain volume. Take a look:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/translator/developers.aspx
Microsoft also has a unique feature called the Microsoft Translator Hub, which can use your terminology, for example, for translations. However,depending on how you implemented any solution with Microsoft, you might still have the problem that you are making more calls out to Microsoft than you'd like, and, moreover, that "matching" only takes place at the level of a whole record or string, so it would not hit the case of shared linguistic elements being concatenated into one string.
There's a commercial offering called GeoFluent (full disclosure--I am the product manager for this product, so I'm clearly biased :)) that works with Microsoft Translator but provides pre and post translation processing that can deal with sub-segment and may reduce the volume you are therefore putting through translation each time. It could make sense if, as you mention, you are rapidly adding to your database. Of course, this is a commercial offering too, so you'd have to balance the costs.
Let me know if this helps, and happy to answer any other questions you have.
Marcus
There is a PHP sample here : http://weblite.ca/svn/dataface/modules/tm/trunk/lib/googleTranslatePlugin.php
That allows you to send and array and return an array.
array(source=>target) getTranslations()
translates all of the user provided strings into the target language using the Google Translate API and returns an array of source=>target
strings.
APIs are getting more and more popular and are used by developers to ease the process of developing applications to multiple platforms AND allow them to give other developers the ability to integrate their application's functionality into their own applications.
I've used APIs countless times before, but I'm now at the stage of developing my own applications. And as a developer who strives to create multi-platform applications - I need to use an API.
I'm going to use the RESTful approach as it's recommended the most.
After reading and looking for some background information, I came across: REST API Tutorial (which is really good site!), I learned that APIs basically receive HTTP requests, and return data in JSON/XML format.
However, there were 2 questions left unanswered to me:
In what form do APIs come in? Are APIs actually files? a set of commands......?
How do I actually write APIs? I'm talking about the server-side, data-handling code, and not the application/language-specific code (for sending out HTTP requests etc...)
It'd be great if someone could help me and answer the questions above as I have zero experience with APIs.
Any help is appreciated - much thanks!!
Just a quick from-the-gut answer: They are whatever you want them to be!
Off the top of my head, I would define an API as requiring two main elements:
Some documentation which makes it quite clear how to use the logic your systems prvides
Some way to call those systems. That may be as simple as a web-site that accepts POST-messages, and checks them for certain variables and values in order to perform specific tasks.
In short, it should be entirely up to you. Just make sure you provide simple, clear and acurate documentation.
UPDATE, as an asnwer to the comment below:
That is how I interpret it, and it would seem that Wikipedia is more or less in agreement with me. PHP would be a perfect example: You could for instance create a PHP-file which processes a POST, and instead of outputting html, outputs XML with the resulting data needed. Then a third party app could POST to your PHP application, and receive and process the resulting XML.
Apis come as a response to a http request. It is a plain text response that u can use encoded via json or xml as you described.
There are a plenty of frameworks to help you develop and API.
In Ruby u can use grape or rais-api or even rails itself.
There is a lot more available, but this are the ones im most used to use.
Our application is interfacing with a lot of web services these days. We have our own package that someone wrote a few years back using UTL_HTTP and it generally works, but needs some hard-coding of the SOAP envelope to work with certain systems. I would like to make it more generic, but lack experience to know how many scenarios I would have to deal with. The variations are in what namespaces need to be declared and the format of the elements. We have to handle both simple calls with a few parameters and those that pass a large amount of data in an encoded string.
I know that 10g has UTL_DBWS, but there are not a huge number of use-cases on-line. Is it stable and flexible enough for general use? Documentation
I have used UTL_HTTP which is simple and works. If you face a challenge with your own package, you can probably find a solution in one of the many wrapper packages around UTL_HTTP on the net (Google "consuming web services from pl/sql", leading you to e.g.
http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/9i/ConsumingWebServices9i.php)
The reason nobody is using UTL_DBWS is that it is not functional in a default installed database. You need to load a ton of Java classes into the database, but the standard instructions seem to be defective - the process spews Java errors right and left and ultimately fails. It seems very few people have been willing to take the time to track down the package dependencies in order to make this approach work.
I had this challenge and found and installed the 'SOAP API' package that Sten suggests on Oracle-Base. It provides some good envelope-creation functionality on top of UTL_HTTP.
However there were some limitations that pertain to your question. SOAP_API assumes all requests are simple XML- i.e. only one layer tag hierarchy.
I extended the SOAP_API package to allow the client code to arbitrarily insert an extra tag. So you can insert a sub-level such as , continue to build the request, and remember to insert a closing tag.
The namespace issue was a bear for the project- different levels of XML had different namespaces.
A nice debugging tool that I used is TCP Trace from Pocket Soap.
www.pocketsoap.com/tcptrace/
You set it up like a proxy and watch the HTTP request and response objects between client and server code.
Having said all that, we really like having a SOAP client in the database- we have full access to all data and existing PLSQL code, can easily loop through cursors and call the external app via SOAP when needed. It was a lot quicker and easier than deploying a middle tier with lots of custom Java or .NET code. Good luck and let me know if you'd like to see my enhanced SOAP API code.
We have also used UTL_HTTP in a manner similar to what you have described. I don't have any direct experience with UTL_DBWS, so I hope you can follow up with any information/experience you can gather.
#kogus, no it's a quite good design for many applications. PL/SQL is a full-fledged programming language that has been used for many big applications.
Check out this older post. I have to agree with that post's #1 answer; it's hard to imagine a scenario where this could be a good design.
Can't you write a service, or standalone application, which would talk to a table in your database? Then you could implement whatever you want as a trigger on that table.