1 Topic by leonardo.rigutini

  • leonardo.rigutini
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  • Registered: 12-10-2012
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Topic: App x smartphone and indicia data servicies

Hello,
I'm developing an App for Smartphone (Android) which should connect to an indicia site and put "observations".
An observations is composed by a {photo, GPS data, info and the user which collected the data}.
I can not found documentation about the Indicia Data Service regarding the "push" functionalities.
Can someone give some information about that?

Thanks,
Ing. Leonardo Rigutini, Ph.D.

2 Reply by Jim Bacon

  • Jim Bacon
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  • Registered: 03-11-2008
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Re: App x smartphone and indicia data servicies

Hi Leonardo

There have been several conversations about how to connect an app to Indicia. There are reservations about connecting the app directly to the warehouse because of security. See http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=1932

The only working app I know of communicates with the warehouse via an intermediate website. This has been developed by Chris Bailey at Bristol University. In http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=3206 he writes "I'll be happy to share our approach, code and experiences with anyone interested"

Using an intermediate website allows you to use the Indicia client_helpers library to convert data posted via an html form in to the structure that you need to send to the warehouse. An example of this can be seen in the documentation at http://indicia-docs.readthedocs.org/en/ … -data.html

The documentation that you are asking for appears to be incomplete at http://indicia-docs.readthedocs.org/en/ … index.html but there is some other information at http://code.google.com/p/indicia/wiki/D … sionFormat

I definitely recommend you contact Chris which you can do through this forum http://forums.nbn.org.uk/misc.php?email=31890 to see if you are able to collaborate.

Regards,
Jim Bacon.

3 Reply by johnvanbreda

  • johnvanbreda
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Re: App x smartphone and indicia data servicies

Hi Leonardo,
As Jim points out, I'm still working on the documentation on the new Read the Docs site, but I think you will find that the web service documentation at https://indicia-docs.readthedocs.org/en … index.html gives useful information on how to authenticate against the warehouse and also how to read back individual records - other service calls will follow in the next few weeks. You can follow on from this with the existing Wiki based documentation at http://code.google.com/p/indicia/wiki/DataServices and http://code.google.com/p/indicia/wiki/D … ionFormat.

I think things have come on a bit since the discussion at http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=1932. The main concerns here were how to authenticate users onto the warehouse to get a unique ID and also how to configure the website ID and password in the mobile application without distributing it. I would envisage that there would be 1 mobile application per website ID/password pair registered on the warehouse (so the mobile application is considered a website itself). Therefore it should be relatively safe to embed the website ID and password into the app code. Users of the app would need to provide their first name, surname and email address then your app would call the User Identifiers service in order to get a unique user ID (see https://indicia-docs.readthedocs.org/en … ers.html).

Feel free to ask if you want more help with this or the docs aren't clear enough.

Best wishes
John

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

johnvanbreda's Website

4 Reply by leonardo.rigutini

  • leonardo.rigutini
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Re: App x smartphone and indicia data servicies

Hi all,
thanks for yours answers... the links you suggested have been very useful.

Actually I solved the login step in this way:
An apposite indicia site (linked with the smartphone app) manages the users. An user which want put an observation into the site must be registered at that site. The registration is done on the web site. When an user is registered, he receive an username and password which must be inserted into the preference panel of the smartphone app.
Those credentials are used by the app to call the indicia "data service" functions for read/write data from/to the indicia.
This step has been already implemented into the android app and it is working.

Now, my problem is to know the full list of "entity" which can be read from data service.... for example: the company which commissioned the app has a list of "personal" attributes for each taxon. We created a set of termlist (one for each attribute) and we added the attributes to each taxon. Using the data service "taxa_taxon_list/1234" with "view=detail" we get the full taxon info without the additional attributes.... in the returned xml exists a xlink which seems link to the data service to get the info about taxon
"..../IndiciaWarehouse/index.php/services/data/taxon/4025"
but if we call that url, the response is an error:
"Unrecognised entity taxon"

In conclusion, my main point is:
where can I found a complete list of "entity" which can be used for building the "data service" url?

Thanks in advance,
Leonardo