Qt DevNet Web Service API
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I have had a couple of hours ot play around with this today. Here is the result of my tinkering so far:
!http://gallery.theharmers.co.uk/upload/2011/04/09/20110409200932-876ce30f.png(QtDevNet Profile Details)!So far my simple test harness just uses QNAM to login to QtDN and then uses the web api described "here":http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTWEBSITE-137 to query my profile details. The main widget is a declarative view in which I have a simple qml scene that binds to properties of a C++ Profile object.
Could I put in a request for an addition to the profile api please? It would be very useful if it also returned an entry for the total number of points in this rank. That is the total number of points required to go from Robot Herder to Dinosaur Breeder for example. This would allow me to calculate a percentage towards next level value and show that in a progress bar without the need to hard-code the rank point boundaries.
Next I will start looking at the Unread Forum Posts api and see if I can make another qml component for that. I will also add in support for profile badges. I'll try to find some time tomorrow to make this little code available to anybody who is interested.
Eventually I would like to release a little QML based QtDevNet app for Symbian etc.
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If anybody is interested, you can now download my little test harness from my subversion repository. Just do:
@svn co https://svn.theharmers.co.uk/svn/codes/public/qtdevnetclient/trunk qtdevnetclient@
Then build as normal. This project requires qjson to be available. If the compiler cannot find it then export QJSONROOT with the path to where qjson is installed and re-run qmake.
The test harness app now polls QtDN every 60 seconds for an update to your profile which is then relfected in the QML scene.
For now it is just functional. I'll add some bling later ;-)
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Good stuff, and a QNAM login. You're on a roll ZapB :)
[quote author="ZapB" date="1302376861"]Oh another api request...would it be possible to have the url to the profile's avatar image returned in the profile call too please?[/quote]
I'll add it to the backlog, no room in the current iteration and filling up fast for the next.
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It was surprisingly easy - only 453 lines of code plus a little QML so far. If I get something useful going then maybe you'll see a new user-agent string showing up in the analytics soon ;-)
@request.setRawHeader( "User-Agent", "ZapB's QtDevNet Client 0.1" );@
When I finish the next stage I may have some more API requests as that will likely be the much easier option as opposed to scraping fragments from a complete web-page. It will result in a lighter load on the server too.
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The changes I had to make to make it compile for me:
In qtdevnet.pro, changed the path handling a bit
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INCLUDEPATH += $$(QJSONROOT)/src
LIBS += -L$$(QJSONROOT)/lib -lqjson
@In profile.cpp, I changed the include for qjson's parser.h:
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#include <parser.h>
@This way, I can actually make QJSONROOT point to where I downloaded and build QJson.
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The only thing you can do at present is to go to the "Application->Login..." and enter your QtDevNet credentials (not included support for OpenID yet) and it will login via QNAM (see the Authenticator class). One slight mystery I have not had time to look at yet is why QUrl::toPercentEncoding() will not encode a "/" character. I have to manually replace that with / later. I'll step into the Qt code later and take a look.
If that works it will start a timer inside the Profile class that polls QtDN for your profile stats once every 60 seconds. The response is parsed using qjson and the properties updated accordingly.
The Profile class is exposed to the QML root context and the qml scene just binds to the properties of it (and one property from the autheticator object which determines if the qml items are visible or not).
It's just a starter for 10/proof of concept at this stage. Nothing fancy. Having said that it will be simple to extend to cover other features that could be supported by a web API.
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Just a small update. The login dialog is now handled via QML too (the actual network stuff is still in C++ of course). It's in svn if anybody wants to grab the update. Here's a screenie (no bling-tastic animations yet though).
!http://gallery.theharmers.co.uk/upload/2011/04/22/20110422154652-693ce8de.png(QML Login Screen)!
ps I hope you don't mind me grabbing artistic assets from the site for use in this client. ;-)
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OK another hour of playing with QML and the login page now behaves more like you would expect, including things like:
Enabling/disabling login button based on user name and password fields being populated
Visible feedback on login button status (enabled/disabled has focus/no focus)
Tab key navigation between elements
Plus it has some bling now - you'll have to run it to see it. ;-)
My opinion of QML so far is that it is very nice, but it will be a whole let better once we have one or more decent sets of components to use (desktop components would be really cool - and yes I have seen the blog with them in). It is instructional to develop your own from first principals but requires lots of digging in the docs for QML noobs like me.
Next step is to see if I can get this converted into a mobile app and try in on my N8. Now where did I put that SDK...
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Sweet! I just managed to get this running on my N8. It's very awesome to see the same QML animations running on the phone - smoothly too! :D
It took a little bit of trial and error and I am still not quite sure what made it start to deploy properly and I can still not get qjson to build for the qt-simulator target. I'll write up some instructions on how to do this and commit my mods to the svn repo shortly.
Edit 1: Code to allow this to be built and deployed for Symbian is now in svn.
Edit 2: Figured out what was stopping me from running this on the device originally. I kept getting the "General OS Error" when trying to deploy and run my app. It turns out that it was because of insufficient capabilities in the qjson lib on which my app depends. By changing the TARGET.CAPABILITY line in qjson/src/src.pro to:
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TARGET.CAPABILITY = NetworkServices ReadDeviceData WriteDeviceData
@allows my app to load the qjson dll on the device (since my app needs access to the Internet). Read about "capabilities":http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Capabilities for more info on this.
I have concerns about how this may scale if several apps want to use the same dll but with different capabilities but that's something to worry about for another day.
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Marius, I wonder if you could help me with something please? I am trying to add avatar support to my little QtDN client and until the API supports returning the avatar image URL I thought I would take the opportunity to try using QXmlQuery to parse the xhtml of the front page of QtDN to extract the gravatar source url.
This is all going fine until I get this error from QXmlQuery:
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Error FODC0002 in tag:trolltech.com,2007:QtXmlPatterns:QIODeviceVariable:inputDocument, at line 74, column 32: Expected '=', but got '>'.
@Looking at the page source I see that line 74 is:
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<div class="wrapper" {set_mode}>
@which of course is not valid xhtml (or xml) as advertised by the doctype. I can work around this by stripping this out before I pass it onto the QXmlQuery of course but would you like me to report this as a bug? Or even better is there an easy fix you can apply to get rid of the above non-valid entry please?
Many thanks.
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Another piece of invalid xml is found on line 190:
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<div class="item"><a href="http://info.arcada.fi/sv/qtquick"><img src="http://www.arcada.fi/sites/www.arcada.fi/themes/arcada/media/separate_elements/main_navigation/logo.png"></a></div>
@The error is:
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Error FODC0002 in tag:trolltech.com,2007:QtXmlPatterns:QIODeviceVariable:inputDocument, at line 190, column 180: Opening and ending tag mismatch.
@The img element is missing the empty tag specifier - ie it should have a "/" at the end of the img tag.
Edit: This input tag on line 532 is also missing a closing "/"
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<input type="text" name="tag_search" id="tag_search_input" value="">
@