Reseller API seem to be underdeveloped? - google-reseller-api

I'm trying to use Googles reseller API to better control and operate our business.
The API can only list seats for Google-Apps-For-Business with an ANNUAL plan. This results in misleading statistics since a big part are FLEXIBLE.
There are no way to see which Google-Drive-storage has Assigned Licenses or how many.
Are there any way around this? - or any ideas behind it?
Have the API not been fully developed? - if so, when will it be?
Love to know.

Check out the planName and skuId properties on the subscription resource:
https://developers.google.com/google-apps/reseller/v1/reference/subscriptions#resource
That should get you Flex plan data, and also data related to Google Drive storage.

Some days ago, Google has finaly added the feature that was lacking!

Related

Determine type of vehicle used for travelling

Is there a way using one of the google maps apis to determine the most probably used vehicle type for a recorded route?
For example is there an automated way to determine if I‘m travelling by train? Or do I have to implement that myself?
You can specify the transit_mode to indicate the vehicle type that the calculated route should prefer.
But what you're looking for is information for the vehicle type that is most probably used for a given route, which is not currently something that the API provides.
I recommend you file a feature request for this in Google's issue tracker so that Google's Tech Engineers can consider implementing this. For now, you would need to implement this yourself indeed.
Hope this helps!

How to get more than 5 reviews from G+ Places?

I found some threads here telling that Google API (places/+/etc.) do not allow more than 5 reviews in the response. However, it appeared most of those were as old as from 2012.
Is this still the case? Is there a difference whether I am the owner of the page/place I want to get reviews for? Most appear to operate on place ID but if I want to pull the reviews of my own business, can that be done or is it subject to the same 5 limit that appears here https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/details#PlaceDetailsRequests
I have been trying to find information on this for hours as it seems ... silly to think there'd be no way to do it.
I think this is a limitation of the Google Places API: Place Details, so far there is no updates regarding this issue, please see this previous question for further details. You can also follow this thread regarding the enhancement request to get more than 5 reviews from the API. Hope this helps.
Google now has (although closed) API called "Google My Business" which allows fetching all reviews for a business and other location management. That solved the issue for me.

How to get public transport time schedule from The Google Maps Directions API?

I am trying to make public transport time schedule app using google maps directions api.
Whats the best way to get all of the possible departure_time's for a specific route from one place to another from a specific time?
The problem is, the server is always responding with only one route for one specific time. How can I get all of the following departure_times?
The worst way to do this is asking server every minute if there is some new travel link. But hey, its gonna take a lot of time!
So I thought google might be providing some kind of transport schedules but I can't find any info on google developers webs. I saw only the way to give google schedule information with the help of General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) here or here.
But I can't find the way to get it from them.
I don't believe google maps directions api will return the information you are looking for as a collection.
The problem with transit data is that calculating a future schedule can require a lot of processing (especially if there are multiple routes involved in the rider reaching their destination) because, basically, the system needs to do a trip plan for each scheduled trip at starting point for the time range.
Google hints at this in their API regarding the alternatives parameter
alternatives — If set to true, specifies that the Directions service may provide more than one route alternative in the response. Note that providing route alternatives may increase the response time from the server.
Also, the different future departure times may actually be different routes or combination of routes (e.g. where multiple routes may come together on the same street for a while - for instance, near a college campus or other transit hub)
In order to get the underlying route data that would have the actual stop times you are looking for you would need to download the transit agencies' GTFS data directly and process it yourself (check our GTFS Data Exchange). This is what your competitors are already doing (e.g. Transit App, Moovit, etc.). There are packages that will do some of this processing for you (e.g. One Bus Away). However, even with the use of existing libraries, there is some heavy lifting involved here (from a development point of view).
As a final note, if you want to pursue using google maps directions api you wouldn't need query it for each minute within a time-range in order to get a series of departure times. You should be able to make a series of calls with the departure time set just past the departure time you got back in the previous call. For example, if the first trip time was 1:00pm set departure_time to 1:05pm and request again, then if the second trip time was 1:20pm set the next departure_time to 1:25pm and request again, and so on to build your list of future trips.
Okay. Firstly your question is not in the right spirit as stackoverflow demands. Check at google's developer console , API section and check if they offer any such API to give you all transport schedules in 24hrs or not ? If there is any such API then good, you can hit that but if not then I am afraid you wont be able to get it unless you hit API after some intervals.
Another suggestion is that , you can try yahoo or bing maps and check if they have any such API for your query.

alternative to Google maps

My client wants some of the functionality of Google maps namely:
- geocoding
- generating maps with points based on postal code or long.lat
- optimal trip mapping
Their issues with Google maps
- cannot control outages
- postal codes are sometimes inaccurate or not updated frequently for Canada/UK
- they have no way to correct inaccurate information
They would prefer to host the mapping application themselves, but will require postal code updates.
Can anyone suggest such a product?
thanks
"cannot control outages - postal codes are sometimes inaccurate or not updated frequently for Canada/UK - they have no way to correct inaccurate information"
Outages
hosting your own mapping is the only way to control this, but you would be very very hard pushed to beat Google Maps / Bing Maps uptime over the last 5 years. Take a look at the following:
OpenStreetMap for the road imagery data, this is open source data very good in the UK (Im not sure about canada) and you can make your own changes and submit them (or just change the data you have downloaded)
Geoserver, Mapnik or MapServer will read openstreetmapdata and create the image tiles needed to create your own maps in whatever style you wish. Depending on if you dont want all countries and all zoom levels these products can create all the tiles you will need in advance, but usually they have to be created in real time and cached. You need a BIG fast server to manage tile crunching
Openlayers or Leaflet are open source javascript mapping platforms that will display your tiles for you
Obviously this is just for road maps, aerial imagery would cost you an absolute fortune.
Post Code Data
Many people do not realize that UK postcode data for latitude and longitude is now completely free and available to download every quarter from the official source (ordinance survey) http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/code-point-open/index.html.
This is the same data source Google will use and there is none better but it will always contain inaccuracies and always be a few months out of date.
Finally
Hopefully that answer the question you asked and gives you information to inform your client. Now for the question you didn't ask "Is this approach good value to my client?".
I won't presume to know your business or client, however what I described above is possible but with one to many months of work involved to get it all working together and even then it wont have any where near the performance or uptime of something like google /bing maps and only offers a small subset of their features.
I think you're looking for something like Caliper-It's a very custom, and I would expect expensive, solution. Not suggested.
http://www.caliper.com/GISMappingSoftwareDevelopment.htm
One solution could be to use two different mapping services and compare their results, this way there's a much better chance the data is accurate. You can also fix inaccurate data by creating a system which acts as a barrier between the API and your user, where data you know is inaccurate is corrected before it's displayed. Not sure exactly what you're doing though, so this might not work for you.
Is trip mapping/routing the basic functionality you want to do?
Before rushing into rolling your own, I'd suggest a good think about the consequences of doing so. The first that springs to mind is whilst the pros are that you can now control your data, the cons are that you now control your data.
So you are going to have to consider where and when you get updates and the processes you are going to have to employ to keep your maps in sync with the rest of the world. There are a lot of headaches involved in these things which is why so many people use externally hosted solutions such as Googles.

how to get US Highway exit geocodes using Google maps API or through some other means?

For our application, we need to get all the US interstate highway exits along with their Geocodes. Can you please explain how to get these using Google Maps API or Google Local search or otherwise? So far I have no clue as to how to proceed. I greatly appreciate if you can point me in right direction.
I am looking for a free or a paid solution that is around $1000. I know there are people who provide geocodes. But they are out of our budget.
You might be able to extract the data you need from openstreetmap. I shortly looked at the API they are providing, but it seems rather difficult to extract the data, although not impossible.
It seems as though GoogleMaps doesn't have this information.
However, you could take this Excel spreadsheet from the AASHTPO and then use my free geocoder addin for Excel to find all the intersections.
Here's a sample for the first 30 exits on Route 1:
It'll be a fair bit of work, and might not be perfectly accurate, but a very good start.
You can easily buy this data from Esri and it is very accurate stuff:
http://www.esri.com/products/index.html#data_panel
I also recommend checking on https://gis.stackexchange.com/, as someone there might know a free resource.
Tiger - US census geo data
Its totally free to download and use but it would be and adventure. I'm not sure offhand if they highway off-ramps would be in it.
I believe that some of the Wikipedia US highway articles have geocode information in them for each exit. A microformat extractor should be able to grab them for you.