Add JSON views for external services

[ed]

TN.org needs to be able to communicate with other websites and applications behind the scenes. This could ultimately be to share data with partner sites (e.g. search on Permaculture association returns TT initiatives), but is initially to return requests based on lat/long from the incoming mobile application.

Install and configure so that mobile application can send lat/long requests along with content types (people, projects, initiatives, events) and TN returns location specific responses.

[jim]

Services 3 beta 1 is now on LIVE...

[jim]

Thinking out loud, the services needed are as follows:

External Sites & Apps (Paul's stuff)

• Ability for external to pass in a lat/long and 'type' (event, news, person, ini, proj etc) and get back list of node titles, a link to node, last updated date and distance from lat/long.

Sharing Engine - from TN.org

• Return list of initiatives with location and feeds - ALL to prime system
• As above but just recent updates to maintain system once primed.

Sharing Engine - to TN.org/other sites

• ability to receive lat/long and return feed items (RSS feed etc) related to it.

This ties in well with extending TN near me (#182)... Any thoughts, Ed?

Will start adding views & services on DEV now.

[ed]

Externals may want access to 'latest' (e.g. Patterns - I know Paul's after them too)

'list of initiatives with location and feeds' if you mean being able to return a list of feed items of the initiatives' news related to lat/long which could appear in TN near me, YES PLEASE

[jim]

Web service 'lite' in place for SE stuff...

Additionally, Paul MacKay? wants this for his app:

Inis:

• name
• status
• region
• initiative type
• community type
• approx members
• main contact
• website
• lat/long
• description
• themes ?
• related projects
• PPoC uid

Projects:

• title
• website
• lat/long
• description
• main contact
• PPoC uid

All in a nice JSON feed.

Prob need two versions of these views:

• 'all' as a dumb dump to prime the remote cache
• 'recently updated' which takes a date and shows updates only to update the remote cache.

Patterns yet to be specced...

[ed]

hang loose on patterns for now - Rob said that there are likely to be changes...

[jim]

Services module NOT being used this time around - overkill for our simple use-cases.

Updating title

[jim]

New JSON view output of initiatives at: ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/transition-services/directories/initiatives/all

NOTE this is effectively a data dump and is inefficient. Will speak to Paul to see if adding ​http://drupal.org/project/views_daterange makes sense so we can pull back, say, all inis updated since the mobile app last checked.

[jim]

discussion ongoing with Paul MacKay?, projects to follow.

And the ContentTypes? page represents the start of the API/data documentation.

[jim]

Projects also have this: ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/transition-services/directories/projects/all

And, so clients can get a smaller chunk of data - these two return only those that have been updated within 7 days.

• ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/transition-services/directories/initiatives/updated-week
• ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/transition-services/directories/projects/updated-week

Poss need 'updated within month' version too...

Have now created all required views, will close this until futher request come through.