Is there a way to query for events in multiple calendars (in the same Google account) in a single batch request?
I've been through the Google documentation here, but it hasn't really helped.
What I'm trying to do really is scan through a given user's calendars and get a list of events for each one.
An example in python/gdata would be amazing.
EDIT: Looks like this answers my question. TL;DR not possible.
Short answer: No
Long answer: The API does not allow you to fetch more than one calendar with a single request and it doesn't allow you to manipulate more than one calendar in a single request.
If this is really important to you (you're trying to reduce requests so I guess it's about performance), you could possible use the Google App Engine to create a function that would perform this work for you. I'm not sure you would see a big jump in performance though.
Related
I have a public Google Calendar link (which I do not manage), and I would like to extract data from it to my python program. (From there I will myself process the data).
Basically, given a url to a public Google Calendar, I want to parse the events. No need to add or delete events, just read the events and their info. I don't see a reason to log in to my Google account because anyone with the url can view said Calendar from their browser with no sign-in needed.
Couldn't find anything on the web that does specifically this. Thanks!
You need to use authentication. There simply is no way around this. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that the Google Calendar API has usage limits.
If there is no way to identify the account performing the request, you could create an app that spams the API with so much requests you bring down the Google Calendar API for everyone. Attaching authentication to the requests allows Google to track the usage.
You should use a service account created specifically for this. The best documentation about service accounts and how to use them in python is this one.
Combining this documentation for the Calendar API with the one linked above should get you started.
Note, if you are performing a lot of requests, you might hit the limits mentioned above. You will need to use what is called exponential backoff. The principle is described here. If you want to know about why to use a random value, see this nice blogpost on how to shoot yourself in the foot.
We are trying to get the owned games of a lot of users but our problem is that after a while the API call limit (100.000 a day) kicks in and we stop getting results.
We use 'IPlayerService/GetOwnedGames/v0001/?key=APIKEY&steamid=STEAMID' in our call and it works for the first entries.
There are several other queries like the GetPlayerSummaries query which take multiple Steam IDs, but according to the documentation, this one only takes one.
Is there any other way to combine/ merge our queries? We are using Python and the urllib.request library to create the request.
Depending on the payload of the requests you have the following possibilities:
if each request brings only the newest updates, you could serialize the steam ID's when you get the response that you've hit the daily limit
if you have the ability to control via the request payload what data you receive, you could go for a multithreaded / multiprocessing approach that consume the request queries and the steam ID's from a couple of shared resources
As #andreihondrari indirectly stated in his comment under his answer, one can request to get an API key which can get more then the 100.000 calls/ day. This is stated under part "License to Steam Web API & Steam Data" of the documentation:
You are limited to one hundred thousand (100,000) calls to the Steam Web API per day. Valve may approve higher daily call limits if you adhere to these API Terms of Use.
This may be complicated and there is of cause the possibility that you wont get approved, but this is pretty much the only stable way you can go.
Furthermore you could theoretically use multiple Steam Web API keys, BUT:
Each API key still has the limitation of 100.000 calls/day so you'll need to implement a fail safe and a transition between used keys and possibly need to create lots of accounts.
As each user has his own specific friendlist and blocked list the API key can "see" a portion of the Steam Community exclusively (friends data is not public otherwise). So it could be that you are using one API key which can't "see" a certain user when you could've used another to "see" it properly.
You'll need a unique email adress for each created account.
Note: Having multiple accounts actually complies with Valves ToS according to this post on Arqade.
For a list of ~30 thousand keywords, I'm trying to find out how many Google search hits there exist for each keyword, similar to this website but on a larger scale: http://azich.org/google/.
I am using python to query and was originally planning to use pygoogle. Unfortunately Google has a limit of ~100 searches a day for a free account. I am willing to use a paid service, but I am not sure which Google service makes more sense - BigQuery or Custom Search. Bigquery seems to be for searches on a provided set of data, whereas Custom Search seems to be website search solutions for a small "slice" of the internet.
Would someone refer me to the appropriate service that will allow me to perform the above task? It doesn't need to be a free service - I am willing to pay.
Two more things, if possible: I'd like the searches to be from Google Scholar, but this is not necessary. Second, I'd like to save the text from the front page, such as the blurbs from each search result, to text-mine the front page results.
BigQuery is not a tool to interact with Google Search in any way. BigQuery is a tool for you to feed your data, and then run analytical queries over those data. But you need first to ingest the data.
I'm trying to make a website that requires users to enter information about themselves. In order to check to see if this information is correct, it needs to enter the information on another website (that has an entire database of these types of users). It will then return the results found. How do I do such a thing? Where do I start? I tried googling but I couldn't even think of what this would be called?
Not really sure what you're looking to do as it doesn't make much sense. But you need to validate data provided by users on your site against data available in another database that isn't accessible to your app.
This means you need to send the data your users are providing to you to the other service that is providing the validation. Perhaps this other service provides an API to do this, perhaps it just provides a form you can post the data to (with python urllib2).
Without have a lot more information on what you're looking to do I can't even venture to guess whether either of these two things are feasible.
I am building a website for a comedy group which uses Facebook as one of their marketing platforms; one of the requirements for the new site is to display all of their Facebook events on a calendar.
Currently, I am just trying to put together a Python script which can pull some data from my own Facebook account, like a list of all my friends. I presume once I can accomplish this I can move to pulling more complicated data out of my clients account (since they have given me access to their account).
I have looked at many of the posts here, and also went through the Facebook API documentation, including Facebook Connect, but am really beating my head against the wall. Everything I have read seems like overkill, as it involves setting up a good deal of infrastructure to allow my app to set up connections to any arbitrary user's account (who authorizes me). Shouldn't it be much simpler, given I only ever need to access 1 account?
I cannot find a way to retrieve data without having to display the Facebook login window. I have a script which will retrieve all my friends, but it includes a redirect where I have to physically log myself in to Facebook.
Would appreciate any advice or links, I just feel like I must be missing something simple.
Thank you!
Just posting up my notes on the successful advice, should others find this post;
Per Daniel and William's advice, I obtained the right permissions using the Connect options. From William, this link explains how the Facebook connection works
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
This section on setting up the actual authentication was most helpful to me.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api
Basically, it goes as follows:
Post a link to the following URL. A user will need to physically click on it (even if that user is just you, the site admin).
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&redirect_uri=http://www.example.com/HANDLER
This will redirect to a Facebook login, which will return to http://www.example.com/HANDLER after the user authenticates. If you wish to do more than basic reads and news feed updates you will need to include this variable in the above link: scope=offline_access,user_photos. The scope variable just includes a comma separated list of values, which Facebook will explicitly tell the authenticating user about during the login process, and they will have to OK. Most helpful for me was the offline_access flag (user_photos lets you get at their photos too), so I can pull content without someone logging in regularly (so long as I store the access token obtained later)
Have a script located at http://www.example.com/HANDLER that will take a variable from the request (so facebook will redirect to http://www.example.com/HANDLER&code=YOUR_CODE after authentication). Your handler needs to pull out the code variable, and then send the following request:
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?
client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&
redirect_uri=http://www.example.com/oauth_redirect&
client_secret=YOUR_SECRET_KEY&
code=YOUR_CODE
This request will return a string of the form access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN.
Just parse off the 'access_token=', and you will have a token that you can use to access the facebook graph API, in requests like
http://graph.facebook.com/me/friends?access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN
This will return a JSON object containing all of your friends
Hope this saves someone else some not fun time straining through documentation. Thanks for the help!
It is true, that Facebook's API is targeted at developers who are creating apps that will be used by many users.
Thankfully, the new Graph API is much simpler to use than its predecessor, and shouldn't be terribly difficult for you to work with without using or creating a lot of underlying infrastructure.
You will need to implement authorization, but this is not difficult, and as long as you prompt the user for the offline_access permission, it'll only need to be done once.
The documentation on Desktop Authentication would probably be most relevant to you at this point, though you might want to move to the javascript-based authentication once you've got a web app up and running.
Once the authentication is done, all you're doing is making GET requests to various urls and working with the resulting JSON.
Here's the documentation about Events, and you can get a list of friends from the friends connection of a User.
I'm not expert on Facebook/Facebook Connect, however I've seen it used/used applications with it and it seems there's really only the 'official' way to do it. I'm afraid it looks like your best bet would probably be something along the lines of this.
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Connect/Authentication_and_Authorization
Regardless of how you actually 'use' it, you'll still need to authorize the application to connect to the account and this means having a Facebook App as well.
The answer to Facebook application authentication is hard to find but is actually found within the "Analytics" page of the Graph API.
Specify the following: https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?client_cred&client_id=yourappid&client_secret=yourappsecret , you will then be given an access_token that you may use on all other calls.
The Facebook provided APIs do NOT currently provide this level of functionality.