Processing hugely varied JSON data from Facebook Graph API news feed - json

OK so I have authenticated fine and understand JSON including how to process it with PHP...
http://php.net/manual/en/function.json-decode.php
But my issues are that the JSON data that the API returns after hitting up FB...me/home end point is very varied. I understand that so is the data on a FB news stream but...
My end game is to show this info in a mash-up with other data but there seems no clear way of formatting it and each item in the JSON response is hugely different with different values. No consistent "item_type" : "photo / status update / message" that I could use to template it up into nicely formatted content blocks on the front end?
Any suggestions on the best way to process / style this type of vary varied JSON?
Thanks.

I would suggest checking out Google's gson library for parsing through JSON documents. Assuming that you are familiar with Java it makes it relatively easy to develop a custom parser that can adapt to documents stored under a flexible schema.
The library page is here. You can find the JsonReader documentation here.
Edit: It also might help to post some example documents so we can get a better idea of what kinds of results you're getting.

Related

Request for example server side generated JSON for HPP integration

I'm trying to use a full page redirect with a direct integration and if I'm reading the documentation correctly I believe I should be able to generate the server side JSON to pass into RealexHpp.redirect. I know the code to generate this JSON is shared in a number of languages, but is the raw JSON output shared anywhere? I ask as the language I'm writing in isn't one of the ones covered, so I'm trying to make sure I get the output format correct.
I've tried re-creating the JSON structure based on what I believe the Java code displayed should output, but I'm obviously doing something wrong as its not working, would be really useful if I had some raw JSON to compare it against to make sure I'm getting the structure right.
Many thanks,
Raw JSON examples are not available, but we do have HTML POST examples (https://developer.globalpay.com/hpp/card-payments). You can build a JSON based on these.
This is how the JSON should look like: {"MERCHANT_ID":"MerchantId","ACCOUNT":"internet","ORDER_ID":"N6qsk4kYRZihmPrTXWYS6g","AMOUNT":"1999","CURRENCY":"EUR","TIMESTAMP":"20221121100715","AUTO_SETTLE_FLAG":"1","SHIPPING_CODE":"50001|Apartment 825","SHIPPING_CO":"US","HPP_SHIPPING_STREET1":"Apartment 825","HPP_SHIPPING_STREET2":"Complex 741","HPP_SHIPPING_STREET3":"House 963","HPP_SHIPPING_CITY":"Chicago","HPP_SHIPPING_STATE":"IL","HPP_SHIPPING_POSTALCODE":"50001","HPP_SHIPPING_COUNTRY":"840","BILLING_CODE":"59|123","BILLING_CO":"GB","HPP_BILLING_STREET1":"Flat 123","HPP_BILLING_STREET2":"House 456","HPP_BILLING_STREET3":"Unit 4","HPP_BILLING_CITY":"Halifax","HPP_BILLING_POSTALCODE":"W5 9HR","HPP_BILLING_COUNTRY":"826","HPP_CUSTOMER_EMAIL":"james.mason#example.com","HPP_CUSTOMER_PHONENUMBER_MOBILE":"44|07123456789","HPP_PHONE":"44|07123456789","HPP_ADDRESS_MATCH_INDICATOR":"FALSE","HPP_VERSION":"2","SHA1HASH":"308bb8dfbbfcc67c28d602d988ab104c3b08d012"}

How does JSON work when calling from Postman (or SoapUI)?

I'm using Postman and sending various requests that get responses in XML or JSON. I want to understand how JSON works with the APIs. I know that JSON is a called response and I know how to write a JSON file and read it and understand it, although I've never actually used it.
So, my question is how does JSON show up on the website?
I imagine someone has to code it there, similar to HTML.
When I google, I just basically get how-to instructions on various tools from a procedural standpoint and nothing relevant to my question.

What is JSONC? Are JSONC and JSON-C different?

Recently came across the term JSONC in a YouTube API. I browsed the Web, but found nothing much about it. Can someone explain whether these two are the same or different?
There is also jsonc aka "JSON with comments", created by Microsoft and used by Visual Studio Code. The logic for it can be found here, alas without exhaustive specification (though I'd like to be proven wrong on this).
On top of that there is this project with an actual specification which is also called jsonc, but also does far more than just adding comments.
While there definitely is a use for these technologies, some critical thinking is advised. JSON containing comments is not JSON.
JSON-C seems to just be a variation of JSON mainly targeted at C development. I.e., from the open source docs, "JSON-C implements a reference counting object model that allows you to easily construct JSON objects in C, output them as JSON formatted strings and parse JSON formatted strings back into the C representation of JSON objects."ref^1
From the YouTube API perspective (specifically, version 2, not the new version 3), The JSON-C response is just a condensed version of the JSON response (removing "duplicate, irrelevant or easily calculated values").ref^2
Why would the JSON response have "duplicate, irrelevant or easily calculated values" values anyway? Because it is converting the original ATOM XML format directly to JSON in a loseless conversion. You can find out more details here.
However, I would suggest using version 3 of the YouTube Data API. It is much easier to use. =)
JSONC is an open-source, Javascript API created by Tomás Corral Casas for reducing the size of the amount of JSON data that is transported between clients and servers. It uses two different approaches to achieve this, JSONC.compress and JSONC.pack. More information can be found on the JSONC Github page:
https://github.com/tcorral/JSONC

Best practices to produce JSON from NotesViews or DocumentCollections

I'm working on a custom control that will be fed by JSON content and I'm trying to find the best approach to produce and consume it.
Let say the JSON could be from:
Notes View (all documents)
Notes View (subset of documents based on a category or filter)
Notes Document Collection (from database.Search or database.FTSearch)
What I have on my mind is to define some Custom Properties where I can define:
URL that produces the JSON
Object
etc.
So far I'm considering:
REST Service control from ExtLib
XAgent that produces JSON
Domino URL ?ReadViewEntries and OutputFormat=JSON
Does anyone knows if the JSON object loaded in memory has a size limit?
Any suggestion will be appreciated.
Definitely go for the REST Service control from the Extension Library, offers by far the best combination of flexibility vs performance vs development time.
Matt
What about creating the JSON in the view itself and then just read the column values? http://www.eknori.de/2011-07-23/formula-magic/
If you want to parse the json object using ssjs, you can fetch it using an URLConnection and put the resulting object into a repeat control using the eval statement.

Is it possible to parse a Google+ (Google Plus) profile page?

If you view the source of a Google+ profile page, it appears rather complex. It seems most of the data is kept in a huge JSON-like objects. However, they don't seem to be really JSON, since they don't get recognized when I try to decode them. I am hoping the format is more clear to other people here. How would you go about parsing it? It seems it would fairly trivial, if you know where to start.
Here is a sample profile, for example: http://plus.google.com/104560124403688998123
Here's a PHP API I'm working on. It can download and parse the data for a profile page and people's public relationships.
https://github.com/jmstriegel/php.googleplusapi
The JSON piece is a bit mangled. To generate valid JSON, you basically have to remove the first 5 characters that prevent XSRF attacks and then add in all the nulls that have been removed. Here's the code specific to handling parsing the weird Google Plus JSON responses:
https://github.com/jmstriegel/php.googleplusapi/blob/master/lib/GooglePlus/GoogleUtil.php
Call GoogleUtil::FetchGoogleJSON( $url ) and you'll get back a giant array that you can then pull data from. Using this, it should be trivial to make a proxy service to translate stuff into valid json(p) for you to use in your own apps.
I don't have access to Google+ yet, so I'll just answer the general question - that is, how to parse JSON.
JSON is just JavaScript, so parsing it is as simple as evaluating the script. To do this, use the eval() JavaScript function.
var obj = eval('{"JSON":"goes here"}');
Another option is to leverage a console tool. Popular modern browsers pretty much all have them. I recommend Firebug for Firefox in particular.
Using Firefox, log into Google+, then open the Firebug console. You can use the console's dir() command to create a browseable representation of the data. Ex:
console.dir(eval('{"JSON":"goes here"}'));
Sorry I can't be more specific about how to get a handle on Google+'s JSON in particular; without access to the service, this is about the best I can do blind. Good luck!
Thanks to Jason for the excellent php class which reads a profile page into an array.
I've used this class as a base and then parsed it, based upon Russell Beattie's python code from the original appspot rss feed application.
Code here
A few notes:
I use this to merge G+ and WP feeds, hence writing posts into an intermediate array ($items).
I have a convention of creating a pseudo title in Google Plus posts, by emboldening a line and adding two newlines before writing the post. The function getTitle strips this out as a better formatted title in my website and getSummary produces the rest of the post with duplicating the title.
It's made up of a number of parts, an object describing your picasa images, one describing the fields on your profile, one describing your friends.
Most of the long numbers are the internal IDs of people, posts and photos. For instance, my ID is 105249724614922381234. Other than that, it could be parsed if you needed to.