I have noticed that some applications provide functionality allowing the user to pull down transaction records (usually for credit cards) from an online banking system. Usually specific banks are supported.
What is the general method to achieve this (i.e., using an API, or something else)? I have seen a web app that supports the bank that I want to pull down transaction records from (ANZ), so I know it's achievable - but have not been able to find any references to any kind of online banking API.
I intend to implement a solution in Ruby on Rails, but I imagine the underlying method would hold regardless of the language used.
Perhaps the bankjob gem might be useful:
http://bankjob.rubyforge.org/
Contact the bank in question and ask them for their API - most of the information you want relates to the security/automated logon issues. the actual data is usually just transferred as a CSV file.
I know easier said than done, but be persistent until you actually are talking to someone in the IT area who can answer questions and not just lawyers and front people. It helps to do some of this in person rather than by email or phone - banks are conservative organizations after all (and if your money is in that bank you want them to be).
EDIT:
Now when dealing with banks don't be surprised if you run into stuff like this:AMEX Security - what's behind this jaw dropping stupidity? - a legacy mainframe system that only accepts 6-8 character, lowercase, alphanumeric entries with no spaces and no special characters. This is why most banks are reluctant to let people know about any outward facing APIs.
Hi I know this is 6 years later but... I thought i would answer it so that future users(like me ) could come up with a solution.
Banks now have api's so you could use something like httparty gem to parse api data.
A simple option is yodlee and their api, or if using rails the Yodlee-icious gem.
hope that helps.
Related
I've been using Stackoverflow for about 5 years now, and haven't felt the need to ask a single question yet, I've always found the answer i needed through previous threads. That just changed and I have a question that I really can't figure out. And it sounds so easy to do.
So the question is; how do you invite attendees, or reply/decline to calendar events on iOS under iOS 10? And please, no we don't want to bring up an EKEventViewController. We'd like to do this in our own UI. Under iOS 9 this was possible through just forcing EKAttendees objects in to the EKParticipants array with setValueForKey:. But under iOS 10 this produces an error saying 'Attendees can't be modified'.
I have used a Technical Support credit with Apple and got the reply that this was not possible. It is not possible using their APIs.
The closest to an answer i've got is to use IMIP (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6047#section-2.2.1). If that's the way to go, could someone help me along on how to actually set that up? I'm not well versed in back-end development, I'm all front-end so I wouldn't really know where to start.
There also seems to be some CalDav servers on GitHub (https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/caldav) but I'm not sure how good they are, or exactly what you need to set one up.
So basically, is there anyone who could give a childs explanation to just how the heck we can send nice invites to calendar events. And if there are different solutions for Google, Apple accounts (obviously under the hood, but implementation-wise) that would be very helpful to know to.
Is this something that requires a ton of implementation on our own servers or is there some reliable service to use? That would be ideal. Maybe you should build one and you got at least one customer here :-)
Appreciate any help!
You cannot modify attendees using EventKit, but Apple already told you that:
I have used a Technical Support credit with Apple and got the reply that this was not possible. It is not possible using their APIs.
The hack with accessing the internal objects using KVC was, well, a hack and not documented API. No surprise they killed that.
So how do calendar invites work. That in itself is a very complex topic (consider delegation, resource booking like rooms, etc etc). There is a whole consortium which works on that (CalConnect), they also have a broad overview: Introduction to Internet Calendaring and Scheduling.
If you are serious into scheduling/calendaring software, it may make a lot of sense to join CalConnect for their interop events etc.
But you wanted a 'childs explanation'. I can't give that, but a short overview.
iTIP
iTIP is a standard which defines how scheduling messages flow, e.g. that you send a message to your attendee, your attendee responds back with accept/decline, what happens if a meeting is cancelled and all that.
It does NOT however specify how those messages are transferred. It is just a model on how the message flow works between the organiser and the participants.
Most 'big' calendaring systems (Exchange, Google, CalDAV servers like iCloud) use iTIP or at least something very similar.
iMIP
iMIP is a standard which defines on how to exchange iTIP messages using email. Say if you invite someone using iMIP, you'll send him a special email message with the iCalendar payload containing the invite. If your attendee accepts, his client will send back another iCalendar payload via email containing that.
iMIP is supported by a lot of systems and was, for a long time, pretty much the only way to exchange invitations between different systems (say Outlook and Lotus Notes).
However: the iOS email client does NOT support iMIP (unlike macOS or Outlook). So if someone sends you an iMIP invite to your iOS device, you won't be able to respond to that. (reality is more complex, but basically it is like that)
CalDAV
CalDAV is a set of standards around calendars stored on a server. Many many servers support CalDAV. E.g. iCloud uses CalDAV. Yahoo, Google, etc all support CalDAV. The important exception is Exchange, which doesn't support it.
In its basic setup CalDAV just acts as a store. You can use HTTP to store (PUT) and retrieve (GET, etc) events and todos using the iCalendar format.
In addition many CalDAV servers (e.g. iCloud) do 'server side scheduling'. That is, if you store an event to the server which is a meeting (has attendee properties), the server will fan out the invitations. Either internally if the attendees live on the same server, or again using iMIP.
Exchange
Exchange supports iMIP but not CalDAV. You usually access it using one of its own web service APIs, e.g. ActiveSync or Exchange Web Services. I'm no expert on them, but I'm sure that they allow you to create invites. Exchange&Outlook have an iTIP like invite flow.
etc
Is this something that requires a ton of implementation on our own servers or is there some reliable service to use?
This really depends on your requirements and needs. Do you need to process replies or just send out generic events?
If you want to host a calendar store, it probably makes sense to use an existing CalDAV server.
Calendar invitations are a very complex topic and you need to be very specific on your actual requirements to find a solution. In general interoperable invitations in 2017 are still, lets say 'difficult'.
P.S.: Since you've been using StackOverflow for about 5 years now, you should know that this question is too broad for this thing.
So I am writing a rails application for my friends food truck business.
The functionality that I am trying to create with this specific application is the ability for him to update the google map by posting a Geo-location tag on twitter.
A lot of the ruby gems that deal with google maps seem to be depreciated so I'm a bit lost at the moment. If anyone could just point me in the correct direction I would appreciate it.
I realize that this feature is just a quality of life feature but id like to be able to do it with embedded ruby and not have to break out the JavaScript (ugh). Ideal this kind of automation would be great for this particular type of website because my friend won't always have access to the back-end of the website when he is on the move. (Already able to update a map from an admin backend but its not good enough for a business that moves multiple places in a given day.)
anyways, thanks in advance. (if anyone wants me to post any of my code I will.)
So after reading your question, I thought it would be fun to tinker with the Twitter API again since I haven't used it in a while.
I went ahead and created a sample application for you that basically does what you were asking for. It looks for recent tweets from a user, grabs the latest one, then updates a Google map with a marker on that location.
Keep in mind that this was quickly thrown together, so it's far from perfect. But all the concepts should be there!
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about the app or anything else. I'm always happy to help.
I am looking to build an iOS app and website that work 'together'.
What the plan is for each:
On the iOS side, it will be pushing information to the server in the form of a post. The users will then be able to vote up and down on the posts as well; which also implies they will be able to see the other users information (in real time).
The website will be viewing this information in real time and using the posts. If a post gets enough down votes the server should tell the website and apps to remove it.
I have experience with SQL. Although SQL does not seem to be the appropriate server choice - for what I want to do - given my experience with it. (I could definitely be wrong.)
I would like to host the information myself, however have heard that Parse is good about holding information for iOS apps. I just don't know whether it gives you enough freedom to work with websites as well.
TL;DR: What kind of database/datastore should I use for a real time queries that allows for push notifications?
All suggestions are welcome. Thank you.
Try Using FireBase
firebase.google.com
Documentation
I am new to web development. Currently I am designing a website where people can purchase different stuff. The website has got a number of special offers such as if you shop for more than $200, you get 20% off, if you shop for 3 similar items, you get a fourth one free.
Can anybody just point me in the right direction what is the best way to do this? Also if the offer changes, I donot have to change a lot of code.
thanks!
You can use various e-commerce and payment gems like the ones in Railscasts.
Some more gems for this purpose are here - The Ruby Toolbox and here too.
As mentioned in the comments, you can use the Saas products like Shopify but that's not free.
I'll point you to some code that should help you out.
For example, " if you shop for 3 similar items, you get a fourth one free. " in ror_ecommerce this is a "Deal". The code is here:
https://github.com/drhenner/ror_ecommerce/blob/master/app/models/deal.rb
This code is not straight forward but basically looks for the best deal an order qualifies for.
if you have buy 2 get one free you might want to implement buy 4 get 2 free and buy 6 get 3 free...
Similiarly ror-e has sales. The only thing you would need to add is a condition for order.total and pass that value into the Sale.for method.
I hope this helpss
DISCLAIMER: I wrote the code!
Is there any ruby gem/ rails plugin available for parsing the resume and importing that information into an object/form ?
I may be wrong, but I don't think you'll find anything completely automated to do this, because a résumé (or CV) can be structured in so many different ways and can contain very different types of data. Any completely automated solution is likely to have accuracy problems, since it is technically a difficult problem to solve.
You may find this answer useful.
Here are some other suggestions that might help :-
Require a user to enter their details into a form on your website instead of uploading a Word document. You'll then be able to explicitly ask for the data you want and you'll be able to store the data in a structure that suits you. However, this may be too much of a barrier to entry for your users.
Allow a user to submit the URL of their résumé published using the hResume microformat. Sites like LinkedIn already publish résumés in this format. There is a Ruby gem mofo which can parse microformats including hResumes. However, not all users will have an on-line résumé like this.