The support forums on ESPN.com recommend using Stack Overflow with the ESPN tag. That's why I'm here.
I'm trying to obtain a list of all NCAA college basketball teams using ESPN's Teams API. I started with this GET request:
http://api.espn.com/v1/sports/basketball/mens-college-basketball/teams?apikey=MY_API_KEY
That gave me a list of teams, but many of them are missing. For example, there is no Nebraska. So then I thought that maybe I need to get a list of teams by conference. So I read this in the documentation:
GROUPS: Allows for filtering by "group" or division, e.g. AL East, NFC South, etc. For group IDs and their corresponding values, make a request to http://developer.espn.com/v1/{resource}/leagues. Not applicable to golf and tennis.
So then I try to make a request to `http://developer.espn.com/v1/sports/basketball/mens-college-basketball/leagues?apikey=MY_API_KEY' and it says the page does not exist.
Is this a bug or user error?
First, I think you forgot sports in the resource. Try this:
http://api.espn.com/v1/sports/basketball/mens-college-basketball?apikey=MY_API_KEY&leagues
That will return a mapping of integers to conferences it seems according to the documentation.
That fetched me:
{"name" :"Atlantic Coast Conference","abbreviation" :"acc","groupId" :2,"shortName" :"ACC"}
...and much more.
Then once you have that, let's say 2 = ACC. You should be able to do this:
http://api.espn.com/v1/sports/basketball/mens-college-basketball?groups=2&apikey=MY_API_KEY'
to get everything on ACC mens' basketball teams.
Bear in mind the API is in beta though.
I could not figure out how to get a list of conferences, but I found out how to get the missing teams. When I was making the first get request, it was limiting me to 50 results by default:
http://api.espn.com/v1/sports/basketball/mens-college-basketball/teams?apikey=MY_API_KEY
They have a sandbox where you can play with your parameters, and I saw a limit and offset option:
http://developer.espn.com/io-docs
To get more than 50 results, you have to make multiple requests using the limit and offset parameters.
First Call:
http://api.espn.com/v1/sports/basketball/mens-college-basketball/teams/?limit=50&offset=0&_accept=text%2Fxml&apikey=MY_API_KEY
Next Call:
http://api.espn.com/v1/sports/basketball/mens-college-basketball/teams/?limit=50&offset=50&_accept=text%2Fxml&apikey=MY_API_KEY
And so on...
Related
For instance,
I have a team entity and API to retrieve teams will be like this:
GET \teams
To retrieve a single team
GET \teams\{team_id}
and so on...
What name will be good if I need to return a short version of the team's list that include only id and name - like select options.
The options below feel incorrect...
GET \teams\select and GET \teams\short
GET \teams\list
GET \teams\dropdown-options
GET \teams\options
these options look good
The documentation describes a meta collection as a combination of 2 (or more) different APIs...
By default, a meta API endpoint returns all data from all of its
sub-APIs, organized by collection.
But, what I find is that it does not do this. It grabs partial data from some sub-APIs and fails silently, without logging an error.
API #1 Result
COLLECTION2
ROW LIST.HREF LIST.TEXT INDEX URL
1 http://www.amazon.com/Org...pollux+organix+canned+dog Canned Dog Food 3 http://www.austinpetsalive.org/donate/wish-list/
2 http://www.amazon.com/Pre...s-Large/lm/R34ISSXSRJPA71 Premier Brand Martingale collars (Pink, Silver, Blue, Red, and Orange) sizes XL or L 4 http://www.austinpetsalive.org/donate/wish-list/
3 http://www.amazon.com/Pre...ords=medium+gentle+leader Medium & Large Gentle Leaders 5 http://www.austinpetsalive.org/donate/wish-list/
API #2 Result
COLLECTION2
ROW LIST.HREF LIST.TEXT INDEX URL
1 Dry kitten and adult dog food (we ask that the first ingredient listed on the bag be meat). Some Brands we love include: Purina One, Pro-Plan, Wellness, Evolve, Blue Buffalo, and Kirklands 9 http://pawsshelter.org/donate/wishlist/
2 Cat Litter 10 http://pawsshelter.org/donate/wishlist/
3 Kongs, Balls, Durable Toys, Puzzle Toys 11 http://pawsshelter.org/donate/wishlist/
Meta API Result Collection 2 -- it's the entire data set from API #2 and none from API #1
COLLECTION2
ROW LIST.HREF LIST.TEXT INDEX URL API
1 Dry kitten and adult dog food (we ask that the first ingredient listed on the bag be meat). Some Brands we love include: Purina One, Pro-Plan, Wellness, Evolve, Blue Buffalo, and Kirklands 132 http://pawsshelter.org/donate/wishlist/ PAWS Shelter and Humane Society
2 Cat Litter 133 http://pawsshelter.org/donate/wishlist/ PAWS Shelter and Humane Society
3 Kongs, Balls, Durable Toys, Puzzle Toys 134 http://pawsshelter.org/donate/wishlist/ PAWS Shelter and Humane Society
The data structure is verbatim the same. Why don't they combine under meta API?
Testing
A meta API combination worked with 2 APIs, each with one collection.
When there is more than one collection defined, certain combinations of APIS combined partially. Each collection filled with the contents of one or the other API, but never both.
The 3 APIs I need to combine result in one site's results in all of the collections, and nothing from the other two in any collection, and no error logged.
The flaky results seem tied to the collections. But I've moved on to a klugey temp fix, which is to call each API separately and combine the JSON results in my app. 3 API calls instead of one. Might be looking for another tool, soon.
Now it works
Since I posted this question in October, KimonoLabs has updated their app and I am now having consistent success with creating and using a Meta API for the set of single APIs I posted above.
That's the positive.
The catch is that you cannot use the URL parameters in a meta API, so if you'd written post-process modify results functions, they will not be executed, even if you use kimmodify=1.
Creating my first REST API and I have a question. I have a resource venue:
/venues
each venue has guests:
/venues/1/guests
This is where I am confused about. If I want to update a guest resource, is it better to do this:
POST /venue/1/guests/1/
or
POST /guests/1
The second option is shorter and since guests ids are unique, the 2nd one works just fine. But first is more explicit.
So I am stuck on which route to take from here.
Thanks
Both are pretty much the right approaches although, if you guarantee the clients (client developers) that the guest ids are always going to be unique regardless of the venue they visit, I will go with
POST /guests/{guestId}
I will normally use this:
POST /venues/{venueId}/guests/{guestId}
when I have to change the status of that guest for that given venue. For example, Guest John Doe with id 1 has RSVP'ed "yes" for the venue with venueId 1 then I will POST the data to the following url (this is just an example where it is assumed that the only thing you can add/update for a given guest for a given venue is the RSVP data):
POST /venues/1/guests/1
request body: {"RSVP", true}
but if I want to update John Doe's name to John Foo, I will probably do
PUT /guests/1
request body: {"firstName":"John","lastName":"Foo"}
I hope that helps!
You can think of you having two RESTful resources to manage
A) Venues and
B) Guests
These resources can be independently managed using POST/GET/DELETE/PUT (CRUD operations)
POST /venues/
GET /venues/
POST /guests/
GET /guests/
Also you can use CRUD to map one resource to another like
POST /venues/[venue-id]/guests/[guest-id]/
Let's say I have the following entities in my libraries app - Library Room, shelf, Book.
Where Room has N shelves, and shelves have N Books.
Now the following url brings me a list of books whose
library is 3, room no. is 5 and shelf no. is 43.
.../library/3/room/5/shelf/43/books
Assuming shelf 43 is unique per room only
(There is shelf 43 also in other rooms)
and Rooms are not unique (There's a few room no. 5 ) in the library.
Here is my questions:
I want to filter with more fields on the entities, here is what i want to do
(representation not in rest):
.../library/id=3&type=3/room/decade=21&topic=horror/shelf/location=east&/books
This is not rest.
How do I represent it in rest?
Notes:
I don't want to do this way
.../books¶m1=X¶m2=X¶m3=X¶m4=X
because not all params are related to books.
Couple of things that you need to look into while designing your apis.
1) are type, decade, topic etc required fields? if so, I will probably make them a part of the path itself, such as:
../libraries/{libraryId}/type/{typeId}/rooms/{roomId}/decades/{decadeId}/topics/{topicName}/shelves/{shelfId}/locations/{shelfLocation}/books
Here I am assuming that each library can have rooms which have unique room ids per library, each room can have shelves which has unique ids/locations per room (and so on and so forth). Yes, the url is pretty long, but that's kind of expected
2) if these fields are not required, you could use a different approach which is a bit less verbose but a bit more confusing for client developers who have never used such approach here. Here's a straight up example Restful Java with JAX-RS by Bill Burke
#Path("{first}-{last}")
#GET
#Produces("application/xml")
public StreamingOutput getCustomer(#PathParam("first") String firstName,
#PathParam("last") String lastName) {
...
}
Here, we have the URI path parameters {first} and {last}. If our HTTP request is
GET /customers/bill-burke, bill will be injected into the firstName parameter and
burke will be injected into the lastName parameter.
If we follow this somewhat academic approach (I have not seen this implemented on many platforms. Most platforms normally go with approach # 1, a more verbose but clear approach), your URL would look somewhat like this:
../libraries/{libraryId}-{typeId}/rooms/{roomId}-{decadeId}-{topicName}/shelves/{shelfId}-{shelfLocation}/books
This way, if the client developer doesn't pass in the non-required fields, you can handle it at the business logic level and assign these variables a default value, for example:
../libraries/3-/rooms/2-1-horror/shelves/1-/books
With this url, libraryId = 3, typeId = null (thus can be defaulted to it's default value) and so on and so forth. Remember that if libraryId is required field, then you might want to actually make it a part of the pathparam itself
Hope this helps!
Question
How do I return different results for the same resource?
Details
I have been searching for some time now about the proper way to build a RESTful API. Tons of great information out there. Now I am actually trying to apply this to my website and have run into a few snags. I found a few suggestions that said to base the resources on your database as a starting point, considering your database should be structured decently. Here is my scenario:
My Site:
Here is a little information about my website and the purpose of the API
We are creating a site that allows people to play games. The API is supposed to allow other developers to build their own games and use our backend to collect user information and store it.
Scenario 1:
We have a players database that stores all player data. A developer needs to select this data based on either a user_id (person who owns the player data) or a game_id (the game that collected the data).
Resource
http://site.com/api/players
Issue:
If the developer calls my resource using GET they will receive a list of players. Since there are multiple developers using this system they must specify some ID by which to select all the players. This is where I find a problem. I want the developer to be able to specify two kinds of ID's. They can select all players by user_id or by game_id.
How do you handle this?
Do I need two separate resources?
Lets say you have a controller name 'Players', then you'll have 2 methods:
function user_get(){
//get id from request and do something
}
function game_get(){
//get id from request and do something
}
now the url will look like: http://site.com/api/players/user/333, http://site.com/api/players/game/333
player is the controller.
user/game are the action
If you use phil sturgeon's framework, you'll do that but the url will look like:
http://site.com/api/players/user/id/333, http://site.com/api/players/game/id/333
and then you get the id using : $this->get('id');
You can limit the results by specifying querystring parameters, i.e:
http://site.com/api/players?id=123
http://site.com/api/players?name=Paolo
use phil's REST Server library: https://github.com/philsturgeon/codeigniter-restserver
I use this library in a product environment using oauth, and api key generation. You would create a api controller, and define methods for each of the requests you want. In my case i created an entirely seperate codeigniter instance and just wrote my models as i needed them.
You can also use this REST library to insert data, its all in his documentation..
Here is a video Phil threw together on the basics back in 2011..
http://philsturgeon.co.uk/blog/2011/03/video-set-up-a-rest-api-with-codeigniter
It should go noted, that RESTful URLs mean using plural/singular wording e.g; player = singular, players = all or more than one, games|game etc..
this will allow you to do things like this in your controller
//users method_get is the http req type.. you could use post, or put as well.
public function players_get(){
//query db for players, pass back data
}
Your API Request URL would be something like:
http://api.example.com/players/format/[csv|json|xml|html|php]
this would return a json object of all the users based on your query in your model.
OR
public function player_get($id = false, $game = false){
//if $game_id isset, search by game_id
//query db for a specific player, pass back data
}
Your API Request URL would be something like:
http://api.example.com/player/game/1/format/[csv|json|xml|html|php]
OR
public function playerGames_get($id){
//query db for a specific players games based on $userid
}
Your API Request URL would be something like:
http://api.example.com/playerGames/1/format/[csv|json|xml|html|php]