I've just spent a long time reading documentation about the Google API Places, and there's some information I don't quite understand.
I need to build an application that can record a travel plan for a user, so a sequence of places.
For this, I need a very simple form, with a "destination" input, which will use "Autocomplete Places".
This endpoint return a place_id for the selected location, which is the only thing I'm allowed to store in a database, according to Google's terms and conditions.
So in my idea, I'll store this id, and a itinerary would be made of a sequence of place_id, without the need to store the place name or anything else. To display the user's itinerary, I'd just have to make Place Details queries, with the identifier.
But the documentation specifies that these ids can change over time, so they advise to redo queries "periodically" to refresh the place_id.
But how can I redo queries if I haven't stored any information about the place, other than the place_id ? Do I need to store the name of the place (and do I have the right to do that?) to be able to retrieve its ID, or am I missing something?
Another thing: I didn't find, or didn't understand, in the terms of use, if I was allowed to store data generated by my site beside Google IDs, for example, to store comments about places.
Sorry if I make language mistakes, im not fluent in english.
Thanks !
Related
Correct me if I'm wrong but it appears that the admin-sdks's Users>list operation doesnt support searching users by ID (According to the docs here).
For example I use the Members api to get all the members of a given group. It returns a list or User Ids.
The only way to fetch data about those users is to call the get operation for each user. Seems pretty inefficient to me.
How come this functionality is not implemented (or perhaps I'm missing something)?
Search feature means you have a pattern and you want the list of all entities which relate to given pattern. It assumes you don't have the unique id of the entity you need. The output of search feature is the list of unique ids with optional additional minimal information which matches to search pattern. To get full information of the individual entity, you need to use unique id and use get information feature.
However, if you already have the unique id, then you don't need the search function. Directly use get information feature.
So google has provided sufficient functionality. If you already have userid, why using search call, use retrieve user call directly.
I'm trying to build a simple reviews site for a very specific search parameter, which I can pull information back from Google Places API. I understand I cannot store any information other than what Google says I can, and it sounds like I can only store the "reference" parameter and the "id" parameter.
Upon creation of a review for a place returned from Google, I need to store some identifier so that when someone else searches Google Places through my site, I can do an AJAX call to my DB and pull all reviews for that Place.
Ultimately, my question is, which key should I store? Or both?
As per the documentation:
id contains a unique stable identifier denoting this place. This
identifier may not be used to retrieve information about this place,
but is guaranteed to be valid across sessions. It can be used to
consolidate data about this Place, and to verify the identity of a
Place across separate searches.
reference contains a unique token that you can use to retrieve
additional information about this place in a Place Details request.
You can store this token and use it at any time in future to refresh
cached data about this Place, but the same token is not guaranteed to
be returned for any given Place across different searches.
It would make sense to store both, reference to retrieve reviews from Google Places and id to group your place reviews in your db.
As of June 24, 2014 the id and reference fields are deprecated. placeId (for requests) and place_id (in responses) should be used instead.
The Places API currently returns a place_id in all responses, and accepts a placeid in the Place Details and Place Delete requests. Soon after June 24, 2015, the API will stop returning the id and reference fields in responses. Some time later, the API will no longer accept the reference in requests. We recommend that you update your code to use the new place ID instead of id and reference as soon as possible.
A key part of my current project is users having the ability to see what other users live near to them. What is the best way to implement this?
I would just ask for country, state and city but because this will be international I can't have a fixed drop down list of states/administrative regions for each country, so if users spell the name of their state differently this will hinder my ability to detect that users live in the same state.
Say for example we have an the Swiss canton "St. Gallen". Some user will spell that as "Saint Gallen", others as "St Gallen" and so on. Which is obviously problematic.
Could I just ask for the zip code and use that? I've found some zipcode tools online but I'm suspecting they don't work very well. Has anyone used them?
Thanks for your asnwers.
Shouldn't you base your query on geographical data rather than administration one? I mean instead of comparing cities/zip codes just find people within, let's say, 5 km from current user location. And if you let every user to choose his/her location on the map, this will be as simple as choosing it from a series of drop-down lists or entering a ZIP code. Also there is an emerging geolocation HTML feature.
Querying such an information is different story thou. You'll probably gonna have to use GIS capabilities of your database: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and others.
I have little problem with permissions in my future social application.
Platform will nonrel db (Google's BigTable).
In my application each user has groups (for example: friends, collaborators, family...). In group has some friends (like in Facebook). And can publish some content (news, short text, ...) only for this group.
If I have user in my group it is my friend. Like in Facebook, but more groups.
My idea is, that each user can see (on himself "feed") all last content of all friends in one page (like as Facebook's Top news).
But I have problems with creating simple query.
For example:
SELECT * FROM News WHERE group_key IN [list_of_groups_where_i_am]
This works good, but there are sub-queries and limit of list is 30 items.
Other way is strong caching of content.
Does anybody have some idea? Or any study material, example...
With a requirement like this you can optimize for either read or write, but usually not both. You have the write optimized version - just write a record with the right group key but have a complex query to get content for all the groups.
The read optimized version would be to write the content (or just its id) to a feed for each user, which makes the read query very simple.
Hi Sitepoint wizard people,
Say we have an admin application that has multiple users and various objects. What I'd like to do is control access within the object itself - that is, it will behave one way for one type of user, and another way for other users. For example...
Director Mike can override Reception user Sally's registration date. One would assume that Mike could set any date both in the past or in the future. Then we have Payroll user Steve who can also modify Sally's registration date, but only for dates in the past up until (for example) one year ago. To spice things up, then we have the HR Manager Mary who can also amend Sally's registration date, but only for dates from precisely 23rd June 2007 up until one month from now...
How can I program the access restrictions so that on the front end, the form control is restricted with a min and max date, and in the backend, the validator checks the entered date to make sure it falls between those dates? I'd obviously need to be able to tweak the min and max dates for each user type. Other objects might have different parameters - maximum amount on a discount field or days of the week for overtime, for example.
I've asked this question in different ways, but each time I get bogged down by the implementation. I'm currently developing it as a php/MySQL web-based application, but thoughts and comments from other platforms very welcome! This time I'm looking at first principles, so it doesn't matter what your background is, if you have any ideas, please let me know! What do you even call this type of access control...?
Depending of how you application is based, you could ask for credentials at the start of the application and depending on who is requiring access, you could load a different xml file containing different settings.
As for security issue, make sure that the different xml files can't be reached by the users.
Edit:
Since you are using MySQL you could do something like this.
Let's say you have a table of users that has those fields : UserId, UserName, RestrictionId.
And with a Restriction table that looks like : RestrictionId, FieldName, FieldCondition.
This way, in your php app, when a user is authenticated, you can go fetch the correct "Restrictions" on the field and apply them in your code. If it happens that you have multiple fields that require different rules then you can simply add them with the correct RestrictionId.
This DB design is far from perfect, I'm pretty sure you can do better
Since, you are already using MySql db. You can maintain the UserRole Master table details in DB itself. Load the user role data based on login, then you can easily validate the changes made by the user accordingly.