Best Approach To Retrieve Search Result - asp.net

I am trying to write a program that extracts shipping container information from a specific site. I've had success with several shipping companies wbsites that use POST methods to submit searches. For these sites I have been using cURL, a PHP libary. However, this one site http://www.cma-cgm.com/eBusiness/Tracking/ has been very difficult to interact with. I have tried using cURL but all I retrieve is the surrounding html without the actual search results.
A sample container I am trying to track is CMAU1173561.
The actual tracking URL seems to be http://www.cma-cgm.com/eBusiness/Tracking/Default.aspx?ContNum=CMAU1173561&T=292012319448 where ContNum is the shipping container and T is a value constructed from current time.
I also noted the .aspx. What is the best approach for retrieving these search results programatically?

Related

How to search through all WooCommerce products/categories...?

I'm developing an ASP.NET Core web application using WooCommerce REST APIs (I'm also using the WooCommerceNET library), and I need to implement a search text input field with a simple Search button.
No problems with that, the issue is that WooCommerce returns 100 items max per page, so the following does not work (this code runs after the property Products has been populated, of course):
if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(searchString))
{
Products = Products.Where(p => p.name.Contains(searchString)).ToList();
}
Since my WooCommerce website contains 23k+ of products, I can't just do multiple (230+) requests, it would take forever.
I thought about having a parallel local database or something similar which gets populated when it's needed, but then I realized that maybe, if I'm lucky, it exists some sort of parameter that I can pass to the request in order to filter the research directly in the http request, so it would already return 100 results of my research.
I didn't find anything about that googling around, so I'm asking here if this is a thing and if it's not, then how to solve my problem in a different way.
It was pretty easier to find than I thought, indeed there is a parameter which can be used in the link, here's an example that works for me:
/wp-json/wc/v3/products?search=stringToSearch

Has anyone displayed a Salesforce Dashboard component on WordPress site? If so, how?

I work for a nonprofit which help disabled military veterans. We have all our participants register with us using Salesforce as the repository of their registrations. We have dashboard components in Salesforce Lighting which totals up the number of active participants we have. I would like to display the component on our WordPress site but have never done anything like that before. I was hoping to find someone who has done something like that and offer some direction on how to go about doing it.
I tried looking up WordPress plugins which integrate with Salesforce. Most seem to be geared towards sending registrations back and forth but not displaying information. From a little bit of research, it seems like coding might need to be involved. Maybe doing a REST API with a Post option which will send the data through an HTTP URI? But to my understanding is that it would require WordPress to be an API. I am sure there are gaps in my logic.
I dont have an extensive amount of programing language experience but am willing to learn. I have taken a few Java and JavaScript classes in school.
I have not attempted this yet. I am just looking for feedback and direction.
Few options here, in no specific order...
Do Wordpress users have real Salesforce accounts or is their data simply stored in SF? Ask your Salesforce admin if there's a "customer community" configured (if your SF org is really old he might refer to it as customer portal). Communities offer nice way of exposing SF to poeple who don't need full SF user licenses. Think like collaborating with real SF users on "My Cases", viewing reports & dashboards... But for this you'd really need people logged in to SF so it won't work if you want just something anonymous. Some more info
Another option might be using Sites (Visualforce pages that expose SF data to guest users). Think like displaying a product catalog, FAQ, web-to-lead form or some other generic "contact us" page that's anonymous. So if you have SF developer (or admin with good copy-paste skills) you could use some Visualforce charts. They can be 100% coded (like this) or fed data from a report (like this) so it's simpler for admin to change the report filters or something without really writing code. Not sure if the simple route will work on a Site, there are some old answers that say "No", you might have to try it out. Worst case you'd need Apex code (or JavaScript) to query SF for results and display them. And display that SF Site page as <iframe> in Wordpress.
A slight twist on the Sites option - do you use Chatter (bit like Twitter inside SF)? There's way to take a snapshot of a report when a milestone has been met and post it to chatter ("congrats for hitting X participants"). And embed feeds on Visualforce pages too. Docs
What SF edition you're on (Group/Professional/Enterprise...)? If you have API access to Salesforce you could query the info yourself from Wordpress and display it using whatever charting library's easiest for you (Google Charts, Flot...). There are tons of examples how to connect to SF from PHP (or maybe you could cannibalize a WP plugin). Technically it's one POST message to log in to SF and one GET to run a query (something as simple as SELECT COUNT() FROM Contact WHERE isActive__c = true?)
That'd be more or less everything in terms of pulling data out of Salesforce. I mean if you have API access enabled you can slice & dice it how you want, extract data with raw PHP code or use some middleware but overall idea doesn't change. Write queries yourself or use "Analytics API" to access report results (so your administrator has power to change it without coding)...
So how about pushing? SF could notify you about current participants count. At scheduled intervals or even realtime. That'd be "just" raw data though, you'd have to write visualisation yourself.
Plenty of options here
workflow rules (code-free), sends XML message to specified URL so you'd need a WP page that can "capture" the result. Could be sent on creation of new record or update of existing. Won't give you totals, it'd be data related to that particular record so you'd have to build kind of +1 / -1 counter... Or if you use a report + analytic snapshot (helper object to store report results) and have workflow on that - that could be really close to what's needed.
scheduled apex job to run some queries and send the results to you. Again - you'd need a WP url that can be called from SF
if there's a CometD plugin for Wordpress you should look at Salesforce Streaming API, Platform Events or (newer and even simpler to configure) Change Data Capture. Basically you "subscribe" to a topic (a SF query) and whenever SF data changes and SF decides it'd change the results of the query - it'd push the results to you. It's almost realtime. Too much to write about them, perhaps best if you'd try to click through some trailheads - SF self-paced training courses:
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/api_basics/api_basics_streaming
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/change-data-capture
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/platform_events_basics

Parsing Web page with R

this is my first time posting here. I do not have much experience (less than a week) with html parsing/web scraping and have difficulties parsing this webpage:
https://www.jobsbank.gov.sg/
What I wan to do is to parse the content of all available job listing in the web.
my approach:
click search on an empty search bar which will return me all records listed. The resulting web page is: https://www.jobsbank.gov.sg/ICMSPortal/portlets/JobBankHandler/SearchResult.do
provide the search result web address to R and identify all the job listing links
supply the job listing links to R and ask R to go to each listing and extract the content.
look for next page and repeat step 2 and 3.
However, the problem is that the resulting webpage I got from step 1 does not direct me to the search result page. Instead, it will direct me back to the home page.
Is there anyway to overcome this problem?
Suppose I managed to get the web address for the search result, I intent to use the following code:
base_url <- "https://www.jobsbank.gov.sg/ICMSPortal/portlets/JobBankHandler/SearchResult.do"
base_html <- getURLContent(base_url,cainfo="cacert.pem")[[1]]
links <- strsplit(base_html,"a href=")[[1]]
Learn to use the web developer tools in your web browser (hint: Use Chrome or Firefox).
Learn about HTTP GET and HTTP POST requests.
Notice the search box sends a POST request.
See what the Form Data parameters are (they seem to be {actionForm.checkValidRequest}:YES
{actionForm.keyWord}:my search string )
Construct a POST request using one of the R http packages with that form data in.
Hope the server doesn't care about the cookies, if it does, get the cookies and feed it cookies.
Hence you end up using postForm from RCurl package:
p = postForm(url, .params=list(checkValidRequest="YES", keyword="finance")
And then just extract the table from p. Getting the next page involves constructing another form request with a bunch of different form parameters.
Basically, a web request is more than just a URL, there's all this other conversation going on between the browser and the server involving form parameters, cookies, sometimes there's AJAX requests going on internally to the web page updating parts.
There's a lot of "I can't scrape this site" questions on SO, and although we could spoonfeed you the precise answer to this exact problem, I do feel the world would be better served if we just told you to go learn about the HTTP protocol, and Forms, and Cookies, and then you'll understand how to use the tools better.
Note I've never seen a job site or a financial site that doesn't like you scraping its content - although I can't see a warning about it on this site, that doesn't mean it's not there and I would be careful about breaking the Terms and Conditions of Use. Otherwise you might find all your requests failing.

How to Stream Through Large Amounts of Twitter Data?

I'll be working on a project that will require a live output of a number of tweets users have hash tagged on Twitter as well as their tweets. Something along the lines of MTV's Twitter Tracker: http://vma-twittertracker.mtv.com/live/#buzz.
What intrigued me about this site is how can they constantly make API calls to Twitter without breaching the request limit?
I'd appreciate if anyone could guide me on the most effective way to accomplish this. From the research I've carried out thus far, I presume I will need to use Twitter's Streaming API.
Since there is a chance that the number of tweets output to my page could be in their thousands (AJAX loaded) along with stats on number of retweets/favourites, what would be the most scalable approach within my .NET site? Any examples or guidance would be appreciated.
Check out Linq2Twitter. It is a great wrapper around the Twitter API, and provides two mechanisms that will help you:
There is a search function that allows you to search for hash tags, etc, which will limit the amount of data you are getting back
You have the option to specify getting all the data since a certain tweet ID. You can therefore incrementally search the feed by performing searches and searching, in subsequent calls, from the ID you left off on.
I have used this many times to search the public feed and have not had any issues to date. I think the search function is key not requesting too much. Good luck!
you can look into Storm framework. Below are few links for further reference:-
http://storm-project.net/
https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm
Thanks for all your responses.
It looks like sites such that display a lot of Twitter stats/data use third party approved providers that have direct access to Twitter's Firehose API.
I have managed to get in contact with an approved provider to supply us with the feeds of data required (and it ain't cheap!).

Shutterfly Order API .

I found this site
http://www.shutterfly.com/documentation/api_OrderImage.sfly
but there are no examples of actually walking through the whole process. Does anyone have any good documentation on using this API to take a local photo and allow someone to order a print via shutterfly?
I went through these steps:
Sign up for an account
Sign up as a developer
Create an application (I called mine Test). Note the generated Application Id and Shared Secret
The Shutterfly API page has a list of references for various Domain-specific APIs:
Address Book
Album Data
Folder Data
Go To Shutterfly UE
Image Upload
Interactive Sign-in
Image Request
Order
Pricing
Seamless Sign-in
User Data
User Authentication
Each uses RESTful principles. The documentation looks pretty comprehensive to me, if you need some background, here's links for RESTful APIs and ROME you may find useful
There is also an API Explorer section on the same page that allows you to test the methods via a form on their site. For example this form for CRUD operations on the album data.
Based on your comment, for your requirements, you would:
Use the Album GET to list albums, then get the data for a specific album.
Use the Image Get request to retrieve the image data, so your friend can verify the image(s) they want to purchase.
Authenticate the user
Use the Pricing POST request to get the estimated pricing for the image.
User the Order POST to submit the order over https
Update: Found a page describing using a Greasemonkey script which adds Shutterfly print ordering capability to Flickr. This might provide the basis for a solution.
For Reference:
The original link above is a middle step of the Shutterfly Open API ordering procedure.
The whole process goes through a series of steps allowing you to control much more than just pushing photos into somebody's album in Shutterfly.
With this process, your application can actually carry out the entire procedure of:
specifying the images and the sizes and quantities, or other products
calculating shipping, taxes, and totals
paying, and
launching the processing
It also includes the ability to see when the packages will be delivered and arrive.
Thus if you have a solid application for mapping your images onto paper and products, you can pretty much control the entire process.
Once the order is submitted, it will appear on the user's account at Shutterfly who the order was associated with.
Kudos to Shutterfly for making such a powerful tool! It would be great if other printing facilities had similar tools.

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