Suppose there are 1000 Person agent on 4 (a,b, c,d) GIS region area. On a certain event, I want to communicate with all the agents living inside GIS region "a" . In "a" region we have 200 person agents.If I send message or command to Person state chart, how I can make sure that only those 200 person agents living on that specific GIS region "a" is getting my command? Is there any way to model that?
You can filter messages inside the Agent's statechart transition, in order to only executethe transition when a certain expression is true (in your case: Agent is in the right region).
Of course you could do this filtering in a lot of other places too, for example when sending the message, or when receiving it. However you can always use this code to check if the Agent is located inside of a GISRegion:
main.gisRegion1.contains(this.getLatitude(), this.getLongitude())
This is assuming you executed this inside the Agent (therefore main. and this.) and the region you are looking for is named gisRegion1.
When working with IDT 4.1 and when making a query in business layer, is it possible to format the yielded numbers? What I mean is - the output looks something like "1.9982121921**E7**" (please noctice E7 part). I would like BO to display the whole number without any suffixes.
Additionally, it would be even better to add a delimiter after thousands, millions,...
Is 1.9982121921**E7** the value that is returned from the database? Thus not a number but a string (alphanumeric)? In that case, you'll have to change the select statement and use a database function to trim the non-numeric characters off (e.g. SUBSTR, MID, LEFT, …).
Once you have numeric data, you can use the Display Format function to change the layout of your object.
If you're not happy with the predefined formats to choose from, you can always define a custom format. The formatting options are described in the Information Design Tool User Guide (links to the documentation for IDT in BI 4.1 SP3), section 12.10.23 Creating and editing display formats for business layer objects.
Right-click and object and select Create Display Format… from the context menu.
Or click the Create Display Format… button in the object's properties (located in the Advanced tab).
Set the type to numeric and enable the high precision check mark.
I was checking one share trading site's AJAX response and below is what it showed up in Firebug Response tab of XHR section. Can anyone explain me what format is this and how is it parsed ?
<ST=tat>
<SI=0>
<TB=txtSearch>
<560v=Tata Motors Ltdv=TATMOT>
<566v=Tata Steel Ltdv=TATSTE>
<3199v=Ashram Online.com Ltdv=ASHONL>
<4866v=Kreon Finnancial Services Ltdv=KREFIN>
<552v=Tata Chemicals Ltdv=TATCHE>
<554v=Tata Power Company Ltdv=TATPOW>
<2986v=Tata Metaliks Ltdv=TATMET>
<300v=Tata Sponge Iron Ltdv=TATSPO>
<121v=Tata Coffee Ltdv=TATCOF>
<2295v=Tata Communications Ltdv=TATCOM>
<0v=Time In Milli-Secondsv=0>
I think what we are dealing with here is some proprietary format, likely an Eldricht SGML Horror of some sort.
Banking in general has all sorts of Eldricht horrors running about.
On a related note, this is very much not XML.
Edit:
A quick analysis* indicates that this is a format consisting of a series of statements bracketed by <>; with the parts of the statements separated by = or v=. = seems to indicate a parameter to a control statement, indicated by a two-letter code. (<ST=tat>), while v= seems to indicate an assignment or coupling of some kind (short for "value"?), or perhaps just a field separator.
<ST appears to be short for "search term"; <TB appears to be short for "(source) table". The meaning of <SI eludes me. It is possible that <TB terminates the metadata section, but it's equally possible that the metadata section has a fixed number of terms.
As nothing refers to the number of fields in each statement in the data section, and they are all of the same length (3 fields), it is likely that the number of fields is fixed, but it might derive from the value of <TB, or even <SI, in some way.
What is abundantly clear, however, is that this data is not intended for consumption by other applications than the one that supplies it.
*Caveat: Without a much larger sample it's impossible to tell if this analysis is valid.
It is not a commonly used "web format".
It is probably a proprietary format used by that site and will be parsed by their custom JavaScript.
Hi I am working on a site and integrating authorize.net payment gateway. I am thinking of adding a dropdown for country names, will passing of "United States Of America" as country variable work? Or should I use "US"? Should I use ISO codes for every country? I tried on test developer account but it seems to accept everything I passes to it as correct!
~Ajit
I know authorize.net doesn't require country names. A simple way to see if they even validate them would be to run a transaction through the production gateway, pass a nonsense value and see if the transaction still goes through.
If you do standardize to support authorize.net (or for another reason), I'd suggest country codes versus full names. Codes seem to change less often, and also can be useful as identifiers. For example, I have an application which presents data for roughly 200 countries; I have flag icons (multiple sizes for each country) that use a 2 digit country code in their name. Using codes made this fairly easy to implement and maintain.
According to their AIM Guide:
x_country: Optional
Value: The country of the customer’s billing
Format: Up to 60 characters (no symbols)
I'm aware there are databases for zip codes, but how would I grab the city/state fields based on that? Do these databases contain the city/states or do I have to do some sort of lookup to a webservice?
\begin{been-there-done-that}
Important realization: There is not a one-to-one mapping between cities/counties and ZIP codes. A ZIP code is not based on a political area but instead a distribution area as defined for the USPS's internal use. It doesn't make sense to look up a city based on a ZIP code unless you have the +4 or the entire street address to match a record in the USPS address database; otherwise, you won't know if it's RICHMOND or HENRICO, DALLAS or FORT WORTH, there's just not enough information to tell.
This is why, for example, many e-commerce vendors find dealing with New York state sales tax frustrating, since that tax scheme is based on county, e-commerce systems typically don't ask for the county, and ZIP codes (the only information they provide instead) in New York can span county lines.
The USPS updates its address database every month and costs real money, so pretty much any list that you find freely available on the Internet is going to be out of date, especially with the USPS closing post offices to save money.
One ZIP code may span multiple place names, and one city often uses several (but not necessarily whole) ZIP codes. Finally, the city name listed in the ZIP code file may not actually be representative of the place in which the addressee actually lives; instead, it represents the location of their post office. Our office mail is addressed to ASHLAND, but we work about 7 miles from the town's actual political limits. ASHLAND just happens to be where our carrier's route originates from.
For guesstimating someone's location, such as for a search of nearby points of interest, these sources and City/State/ZIP sets are probably fine, they don't need to be exact. But for address validation in a data entry scenario? Absolutely not--validate the whole address or don't bother at all.
Just a friendly reminder to take a step back and remember the data source's intended use!
\end{been-there-done-that}
Modern zip code databases contain columns for City, State fields.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zips/
http://www.populardata.com/
Using the Ziptastic HTTP/JSON API
This is a pretty new service, but according to their documentation, it looks like all you need to do is send a GET request to http://ziptasticapi.com, like so:
GET http://ziptasticapi.com/48867
And they will return a JSON object along the lines of:
{"country": "US", "state": "MI", "city": "OWOSSO"}
Indeed, it works. You can test this from a command line by doing something like:
curl http://ziptasticapi.com/48867
Using the US Postal Service HTTP/XML API
According to this page on the US Postal Service website which documents their XML based web API, specifically Section 4.0 (page 22) of this PDF document, they have a URL where you can send an XML request containing a 5 digit Zip Code and they will respond with an XML document containing the corresponding City and State.
According to their documentation, here's what you would send:
http://SERVERNAME/ShippingAPITest.dll?API=CityStateLookup&XML=<CityStateLookupRequest%20USERID="xxxxxxx"><ZipCode ID= "0"><Zip5>90210</Zip5></ZipCode></CityStateLookupRequest>
And here's what you would receive back:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<CityStateLookupResponse>
<ZipCode ID="0">
<Zip5>90210</Zip5>
<City>BEVERLY HILLS</City>
<State>CA</State>
</ZipCode>
</CityStateLookupResponse>
USPS does require that you register with them before you can use the API, but, as far as I could tell, there is no charge for access. By the way, their API has some other features: you can do Address Standardization and Zip Code Lookup, as well as the whole suite of tracking, shipping, labels, etc.
I'll try to answer the question "HOW should I populate...", and not "SHOULD I populate..."
Assuming you are going to do this more than once, you would want to build your own database. This could be nothing more than a text file you downloaded from any of the many sources (see Pentium10 reply here). When you need a city name, you search for the ZIP, and extract the city/state text. To speed things up, you would sort the table in numeric order by ZIP, build an index of lines, and use a binary search.
If you ZIP database looked like (from sourceforge):
"zip code", "state abbreviation", "latitude", "longitude", "city", "state"
"35004", "AL", " 33.606379", " -86.50249", "Moody", "Alabama"
"35005", "AL", " 33.592585", " -86.95969", "Adamsville", "Alabama"
"35006", "AL", " 33.451714", " -87.23957", "Adger", "Alabama"
The most simple-minded extraction from the text would go something like
$zipLine = lookup($ZIP);
if($zipLine) {
$fields = explode(", ", $zipLine);
$city = $fields[4];
$state = $fields[5];
} else {
die "$ZIP not found";
}
If you are just playing with text in PHP, that's all you need. But if you have a database application, you would do everything in SQL. Further details on your application may elicit more detailed responses.