| Name: |
10/17 Prelim Release |
| Description: |
(This is a post of an email that was sent to the list of interested developers from the original API Conference call)
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Hello Community Developers!
I know we said we weren’t going to communicate via email, but we wanted to provide a status update and some important details. We hope you have had time to look through the documentation we released last week, if not, you can still find it through our Apiary website (http://docs.frceventsprelim.apiary.io/). As promised, we are ready to move to the next phase of our testing plan, which is still in the “preliminary” phase, but with a more realistic backend than the mock server that was available from Apiary. In this new phase, we have made data from a few 2014 events available through the API, and as you will see if you request the event listings, we have added an event code for the “River Rage” event that is happening here in New England next weekend. Our intention is to be syncing data to the API throughout the event, meaning that you will be able to make requests against the API and retrieve data about the “River Rage” event just like you would with a regional. There are a few caveats though, and we kindly ask that you please carefully read through them. They will help prevent headache for you, and for us:
• This is not a production environment. It cannot stand up to constant hammering of requests. Please, be respectful of the system and other users since everyone will have the same token for now. With the exception of River Rage data, the other data won’t change, so there is no need to make numerous requests at a rapid speed. We know people will want to test parameters and scripts, and that is fine, but with the development server it is currently on, if the system gets overloaded and goes down, everyone loses out.
• We have randomly entered some data from 2014 events, so things may not be perfect. At this point, we are not looking to correct data, but rather to address any issues with the actual interface and access. What we mean is, for example, if you think a particular match should have said red final score of 100 instead of red final score of 110, we kindly ask that you please disregard such differences. The data in this database is meant as a representation of a grouping of events in a real season, it may not be perfect.
• At this time, none of the district functionality will work. In the event listings API, you can use the optional `excludeDistrict` parameter, but others (like the `districtCode` parameter in event listings) will not work. We are aware of this, and it is something that will appear in a later edition and, of course, production versions. This also means the district listings API returns nothing.
• The API requires authentication. Please see the section of the documentation about “Authorization Center” for the details about how to make calls without receiving the “401 Unauthorized” response.
• Please read through the examples and documentation before reporting Trackers, many common questions are addressed there and can save the time of typing out a detailed tracker report. On that same note though, if you do discover anything that doesn’t seem to function correctly or seems out of place, please do open a tracker on the TeamForge site. That way, one of the support folks can reply to you and update the bug report as needed.
You can use the season data API to retrieve the event listings for 2014, and that will work, but please be aware that only the following events will have data loaded for the other APIs (rankings, results, etc):
Boilermaker Regional – INWL
Greater Kansas City Regional – MOKC
Minnesota 10000 Lakes Regional – MNMI
Lake Superior Regional – MNDU
Central Illinois Regional – ILIL
River Rage Off Season – RIVER (event happens 10/25 in NH)
At this time we aren't supporting unique API tokens. Instead, we have one token to share. That token needs to be implemented as described in the documentation, so please read through it. Notice that the examples Apiary shows do not account for the authorization, so you will need to adjust your code accordingly. The shared key is:
(removed from web post)
You can access the API at the following URL. Please note that because of the authorization requirement on the API, viewing the page in a browser won’t work (since you don’t supply the token). You will need to use code from the language of your choice, or a web debugging tool like Fiddler to try out this next edition.
(removed from web post)
We hope that this next step will prove useful to you in your development. Please provide us with feedback, positive or negative, through TeamForge so that we know how people’s test efforts are working out. Remember to use trackers for things you believe to be “bugs” or “suggested improvements” (there are locations for each) and use discussions for more general, community discussions about the tools and API. While you are on TeamForge, please enable your notifications. You can do this by (once you are logged in) going to “My Workspace” >> “Monitoring” >> “FIRST Community Developers” >> “Monitored Applications” and checking the boxes there. That way, as we post and update things, you are able to receive updates about them.
Thank you for your efforts to better our community tools, and we look forward to the coming days and weeks of development.
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Alex Herreid and Chuck Harris
FIRST Robotics Competition
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If you were not on the email list for this message but are interested in participating in this phase please email aherreid@usfirst.org with your name, team and desired use and we can get you the pieces that were removed from this web version. Thank you. |
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| Status: |
Active |
| Maturity: |
Development Build |
| Related Planning Folders: |
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