I want to use the CoverArtArchiveClient to load Album Images from MusicBrainz but it requires a MusicBrainz ID (MBID). Can someone provide info on how to get the MBID for a particular Album? Code samples would be much appreciated.
Thanks
The details depend a lot on what representation you have of "a particular album".
In general MusicBrainz provides a web service (in XML and json format) where you can search for MusicBrainz entities, which will also give you the MBID.
You want to get the MBID of release entities.
Since you seem to be developing on Android in Java you might be interested in musicbrainzws2-java the Java binding of the Web Service.
There are other language bindings/libraries available for the current version (WS/2 = "NGS") of the web service and you always have the option to use the web service directly.
If you have the album available in the form of tagged audio files, then you should try to extract the tags, since sometimes MBIDs are already available in the files and you don't have to search on MusicBrainz.
EDIT:
SO how-to-get-album-image-using-musicbrainz has an answer that tells how to use the web service directly.
The MusicBrainz web service can also return links/urls to coverart directly (as described in that answer). So you save another call to the CoverArtArchive.
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I want to write an app get the information from posts (mostly about new classes) on my university website then make some annoucement once there is new class.
I've google and see RSS mostly, but the page I want to get data does not use RSS. I read something about website using service so we can read XML in the app, but I don't know if the page using service or not. Last resort is using host (somee for example) and js to get text from the page, then the app could read data from the host.
That's all I have right now, but it's still unclear for me. Any suggestion about what to read, what should I use?? Much appreciation
I think the first thing you do should be to ask your uni if they provide any feed or webservice for these data that you could use.
If they don't, or don't answer at all, your last resort would be scraping. To do this, you can use an HTML parser, like jsoup, and then go through the HTML data, getting information as you need.
To see if there are been changes, you would just have to cache your current processed information, probably in a database, and compare the new one to the one currently saved.
So the applinks documentation states that you should specify your app's package name through the al:android:package property, and the consuming application should launch an Intent to start your app. What I feel is lacking from the documentation is a suggestion or specification on how to provide custom parameters or routing info with that Intent. It's not deep linking unless you specify some depth!
It does specify how to provide Extras through the use of the al_applink_data structure. It does not however say how the target application should provide metadata for the client to consume and send with that structure.
The only suggestion I can think of is to provide the metadata through the optional al:android:url-parameter. So for instance if I'm running a blog, I would provide the URL com.myblog://123, "123" being the ID to a blog entry.
I don't feel like this is an optimal solution. I would then have to parse the URL in order to get the argument. I feel a better solution would be to have a an applink-property named something like al:android:extras where I could give key-value pairs to consume directly. Why is it not implemented this way?
Am I doing it right if I implement metadata-passing the way I described? Is there something I'm missing with regards to the applinks spec?
The original http(s) url is given to you inside al_applink_data under the target_url key, so you can certainly pass metadata that way.
Passing it via the optional al:android:url is also OK.
Lastly, if you have cooperation from the calling app, they can certainly pass data to you via the extras blob.
The reason there's no al:android:extras is that app links was designed to be a routing protocol, and not describe semantics for your app.
I am trying to write a little Android app for my daughter. The goal is to scan a book's bar code and pass the ISBN number to this website: http://www.arbookfind.com/default.aspx . The result will show if the book is part of the Accelerated Reader program and how many points the book is worth. I am trying to automate the part where the ISBN would need to be entered into the search field.
For simplicity's sake, and because I'm not a programmer, I am using MIT's App Inventor 2. I can now scan and get the ISBN but I will need to know how to format a URL to the website that will allow me to pass the ISBN to it's search page.
Is it possible to send a variable via the URL similar to index.php?myvar=testing&someothervar=somethingelse ? I've tried but perhaps I am not using the correct variable name or format for aspx. Is there an easy way to see what the variable name is in the aspx displayed page in my browser?
EDIT To clarify, I am not trying to scrape data and avoid showing ads from the site I am using to generate the results. I am wanting to pass the ISBN number to the page and have it search and display the resulting page in the phone's browser. I am also fine with a method that would populate the search field and the user would have to hit the search button if that can be accomplished easier.
I would recommend abandoning this route, as it is highly unlikely that the owners of this website will want you passing a query string to their site anyway, but rather they will most likely point you to an Application Programming Interface (API) that they provide, so that your program can connect to this service (free or paid, depending upon the company) and then you can request the book's details by providing the ISBN in the request.
There is no discovery mechanism for an .aspx page like there is for a web service to find out the names of things to pass. Even if you figure out what the name of the query string is that you could pass in for ISBN, you run the risk of the implementation being changed and your "application breaking". While this is also true of web service APIs, since APIs are the route the website providers want you to use, as opposed to screenscraping, then they generally inform their users of breaking changes or newer versions of the API via documentation.
From what I can see that page does not accept URL-variables for their search field the way google.com and other does. The page is generated through some sort of content management system (CMS) and it relies heavily on javascript to make things work. I tried doing a normal search there, and you have two issues you need to wriggle around.
First, the page redirects you to a page where you select if your a student, parent etc. It seems that it relies on some session cookie to remember the setting, but it times out pretty fast.
Second, the form uses javascript to trigger the search, and it appears to be done using AJAX, a method of using javascript to trigger actions on the server and displaying the results, without actually loading the page again. You might be able to get a hold of the javascript code used and re-engineer it for your purposes, and call that using HTTP POST and/or GET from your app, but it is a tricky path, and quite possibly not allowed by the company since you will be loading data from their site, without presenting their advertisements and thus be costing them money.
In my app a user can (only) see the values uploaded by admin.
For example. A salesman is using the app will be able to see the latest rate provided by the manger to trade.
Now the question is "where to put these values?"
I have .net webservice experience with android but I guess it wont work in this scenario,will it?
Any suggestion that the returned result be in (preferably) XML format.
It sounds like you already know how to do this. You can download and parse xml within your app. If you alreayd know how to set up the websever, the rest is easy. Limiting who can see what is just a matter of associating specific transactions with an individuals account. Then just have the phone check for updates on that transaction when the app loads (using someting like AsyncTask) or if you want to get more complicated you could push notificatinos using the android cloud service, or even use a REST model. More details are needed for a more specific answer but you can do what you want.
You can do it on your own, and build a webserver with a MySQL/PHP JSON API or you can use parse.com for a smaller project.
I am planning to make a desktop application which will have 5 regional newspapers and the user can select either of them to read it.
I need seperate colums such as Opinion,Editorial,Breaking News,Sports,etc. which means I need data of their every column.
But when I visited few papers' websites,they are just giving the headline, one line description and a link to read more as xml feed.On clicking the link the user is directed to their website.
I have seen many android applications like news Hunt ,World news,etc , which show the entire content.How do they do it?Are they using any backdoor or hack or something?
Use Jaunt Api .
The Api has easy-to-learn structure and also the code is efficient as well as fast.
You should give it a try.
Try to use a third service like
http://import.io/ or http://www.mozenda.com
As you said apps like Flipboard, Breaking news sport etc are based on services like import.io
With this you can transform information from the web into usable data easily !
Some of this app used JSON in retrieving the content from the web and pass into android app. check this link
They use an API that allows them to retrieve news (load from a server).
For example yahoo, google, etc
Not tested yet but it works (I'm sure) see yahoo API
In your case, You should write another view to display news details according to the news ID: Read their documentation carefully
Some Websites will write their own public API, which everyone can access with some HTTP header values sent. After sending HTTP request, they return the response in XML / JSON formats which you have to parse them inside your Android app and produce them on UI.
If in case they do not provide any API as such, then you need write a server side Crawler which crawls and parses the information(HTML Tagged information) from their websites and store them. Again then you need to write your own Web services(RESTful / SOAP) that send the parsed information to Android app via URL's or something.
This can be achieved using RSS feed.
visit here and see page source, here you can get all news in item tags like this
<item>
<title>..</title>
<description>...</description>
</item>
where each item tag is for each news, you can fetch both title and description from there.
and you can get data from any link using HTTPPOST or HTTPGET mehods