In my Zapier CLI app, I need to receive raw data from the previous step. Is there a way to achieve that?
David here, from the Zapier Platform team.
This isn't something that's possible. For security reasons, your app can only access data that a user has explicitly provided (via bundle.inputData). If it's important to the function of your app, you can have a dict type that accepts arbitrary input, but it'll be hard to justify that as a need for your app.
If you'd like to discuss further, I'd reach out to partners#zapier.com and we can talk to you about it!
Related
I have been given an assignment. It pertains to integration/transformation using xml/xslt and is deliberately vague. I have been given a sample integration (shown below) and I have been tasked with listing several questions I would ask before delivering this design,
The hypothetical integration
Data Source --> Mapping ---> output
The question is so vague I couldn't think much. I am not looking for anyone to plagiarise from, but I am hoping someone could post some sample questions to help me get started.
Pertinent Information
Note: Stack Overflow is not a place for you to cheat on an interview process. I am providing this information for other users who are looking to familiarize themselves with integrations. If you don't already know what questions to ask here, and are applying for an SOA job, you will likely be fired within a month. Dishonesty can cost a business a lot of money, and if you cheat your way into a job don't be surprised when you get blackballed or worse - perpetuate a harmful stereotype.
There are a variety of questions you would need to ask before implementing this type of integration. Here are a few things that come to mind.
1. What type of integration is this?
There are a variety of different integration paradigms. I would need to know if it is
An app/request driven orchestration
A scheduled orchestration
A file transfer
A pub/sub subscription
2. Is it invoked or triggered
An invoked integration is one that begins when it is specifically called. If I had a REST service that returned a list of countries, and your call that service every time a button was clicked that would be an invocation based integration.
Integrations can also be trigger based. Let's say you had a table that stored customers. You want to send an email whenever a new customer is added to that table. If you set your initial data source (adapter) as a trigger source on a row insert you could essentially have the integration run without explicitly being triggered.
3. What is the data source?
I would need to know if the data source is REST, SOAP, a database (DB2, MySQL, Oracle DB, etc), a customer adapter, etc. IS the data source adapter the entry point here or is the initial app adapter not shown?
4. What is the schema definition of the request / response body, and how is it specified?
You have a data source (which appears to be your initial app adapter), then you have a transformation, and a response. You can't do any transformation (or build an integration) if you don't know what the input / output will be (with some exceptions). This is really a multi level question.
How do I specify the request and response? Do I need to draft a JSON Schema or XSD document? Some platforms allow you to specify XML or JSON and they will do it's best to generate a schema for you.
What is the request and response content type? You can specify the request / response in whatever format is acceptable, but that doesn't necessarily mean that is the request / response type. For example some platforms let you specify your request body with an XSD but the content type is actually JSON. Is it XML, JSON, Plain Text, other?
5. What about other parameters
Basically, what does the endpoint look like? Are there query parameters, template parameters, custom header parameters, etc?
6. How is this integration secured?
Is this integration security using OAuth? If so what type of tokens are used (JWT, etc)? Does the integration use basic authentication?
Based off the answers to the previous questions you may then have questions about the mapping. For example, if I was provided a schema definition for the output that had an attribute called "zip" I might ask how they wish to format that, etc. I wouldn't ask anything about what technology is used for the mapping. Firstly, because it'as almost always XPath/XSLT, secondly that isn't something you need to know, it's something you would figure out on your own.
I currently work at a school and have an idea to create an app that allows students to contact a grown up (for example, the principle) anonymously through an app. The app would quite simply consist of a contact form. I am trying to find out the best, and easiest way to achieve this without setting up servers with a separate API. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to achieve it? Is there any way to set up an e-mail form with a pre set recipient and a built in sender-account? Please guide me in the right direction.
You would need to implement an SMTP client. You can use open source code like skpsmtpmessage
It's likely that their example app could be your solution.
Your biggest problem will be the deployment. You definitely need to pay an $99/y developer account and add all the students device ID's to your account (with a maximum of 100 devices/y) or register all of them as beta tester (I don't know the limitations).
Probably this isn't doable so easily, as it seems you don't have iOS developing experience so far. Maybe you can find something on the app store that works with self hosted databases. But you definitely need to host some kind of webApp/API.
You may want to give Appygram a try to handle the back-end if you are able to set up the contact form itself. While it's a separate hosted API, at least you don't have to build/manage it.
Appygram is a free web service that would allow you to configure all the details such as which adults could be contacted, their point(s) of contact (i.e. email address), and it would process and send all the submissions for you. All your app needs to do is send a form post request.
A nice thing about having this information outside of the iOS app itself is that you can change the contact details on the fly without requiring an update to the iOS app itself. Whether you use Appygram (which, since I contribute to it, I am slightly biased toward!) or something similar, I would say that since this is for students, I would recommend a solution that would allow you to update your configuration without requiring app updates.
Finally, I'd second what Julian said. The challenge here could be with deployment. One possible alternative would be to make this a mobile-friendly web page accessible only via student login or on the school network (or both). Would probably be easier development-wise and wouldn't require installs nor the hurdles that Julian described with device registration, etc. And, Appygram would still work with this setup as well.
Good luck!
Is there a way to get data from the user while they use my app on their device (iPhone/iPad). For example, if the app fills a dictionary during the runtime about which avatar is used most of the time and which avatar not, is there a way to transfer that dictionary to me? Do I need a server?
This is my first time thinking about data transfers over the internet. I don't have any idea or any experience on how to do that. Somehow I feel it is impossible for some security reasons. I found the NSURLConnection class, but this seems to be only one way to move data from a server to the app.
Thanks.
Not sure if I fully understand the question, but I am assuming you would like to get information about how the user is using your application?
This is definitely possible; and yes, you will need a server to send, retrieve or store the information that you require, or else there is no way to get the data from the application to you! You will need to learn how server side and client side web scripting works (if you do not know already) as this is how the application will communicate with your server.
Depending on the kind of information you are trying to retrieve, there may be security issues and Apple may not accept your application. However, if your data is specific to your application features, there should be no issue of this kind.
HTH
I was wondering how I would go about updating my passes. I already know I need a webServiceURL (which I assume will be your IP address or one set on Ruby on Rails or something) and an authentication token. I'm more focused on how I would actually, physically update it. Is there an easy way out of this? Sort of like those iPhone app creating websites (but you don't professionally code it). I'm going to look into it more, but there aren't too many resources on the internet to choose from (that are useful).
If you are looking for a WYSIWYG, point and click solution, you might want to check out our service PassKit.
To see how updates work, you can start with this demo pass, flip it over and push yourself an update. You can import the template for the demo direct into the pass creator, edit it, and be pushing updates to your own passes within 5 minutes.
We also have a fully functional API that allows your to update and push a new pass your pass in a single call, E.g.
https://api.passkit.com/v1/pass/update/template/yourTemplateName/serial/yourPassSerial/push/?field_value1=newValue&field_value2=newValue2
If you want some code to get you stated, you can also access the source code to our pass creation pages.
If you are going to roll your own, I would use passbook-ios or something like that which is a Ruby Gem. If you want to use a service Urban Airship has one....though the pricing is a bit expensive at 10 cents a pass.
Lance
I have never worked with the twitter api, so I have no idea if this is possible. What I want to do is to trigger a url everytime something new happens on a users timeline (?). Is this possible, and if so, how do I do it?
Yes, but it takes a bit of work. You need to use the twitter streaming API, specifically the follow option.
From twitter:
Example: Create a file called ‘following’ that contains, exactly and
excluding the quotation marks: “follow=12,13,15,16,20,87” then
execute:
curl -d #following https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/filter.json
-uAnyTwitterUser:Password.
Basically you pass a list of user ids you want to follow, open a long-lived connection, and twitter sends back to you anything that the user posts publicly. You can monitor this connection and do things when a user posts something.
You have another option, called a User Stream , which gets you way more information about when a user does anything, but it requires the user's approval, and a much more complex authentication process via oAuth. So I would only use that if you need it.
How you're going to be keeping a persistant connection open to twitter is something very much dependent on your programming language and software. In Python, I really like tweepy, but even for python there are several different libraries, or you can just use curl or pycurl and do it yourself like in the example above.