I have a couple of questions regarding the Graph Api > Search Posts functionality (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/search/):
What operators does the QUERY paramater accept? Usually search engines accept AND, OR, exact match ("red apples") and NOT/exclusion. I'm confused about how these operators function for Facebook.
What exactly does it search through? Sometimes I see results that don't match the search query at all. Does it search through the posts's message, or through comments from posts as well?
The query parameter only accepts strings and not operators. You should specify a type too so you can filter between users, posts, etc. Depends in what you want to search for, you will need a valid user access_token.
If you are searching for posts, it will only search within the post itself, and not the comments.
Related
I need to create a RESTful webservice that allows for addressing entities by using different types of IDs. I will give you an example based on books (which is not what I need to process but I want to build a common understanding this way).
Books can be identifier by:
ISBN 13
ID
title
I can create a book by POSTing to /api/v1/books/The%20Bible. This book can then later be addressed by its ISBN /api/v1/books/12312312301 or ID /api/v1/books/A9471IZ1. If I implemented it this way I would need to analyze whatever identifier gets sent and convert it internally.
Is it 'legal' to add the type of identifier to the URL ? Like /api/v1/books/title/The%20Bible?
It seems that what you need is not simply retrieving resources, but searching for them by certain criteria (in your case, by ISBN, title or ID). In that case, rather than complicate your /books endpoint (which, ideally, should only returns books by ID), I'd create a separate /search function. You can then use it search for books by any field.
For example, you would have:
GET /search?title=bible
GET /search?isbn=12312312301
It can even be easily expanded to add more fields later on.
First: A RESTful URl should only contain nouns and not verbs. You can find a lot of best-practices online, as example: RESTful API Design: nouns are good, verbs are bad
One approach would be to detect the id/identifier in code.
The pattern would be, as you already mentioned:
GET /api/v1/books/{id}, like /api/v1/books/12312312301 or /api/v1/books/The%20Bible
Another approach, similar to this.lau_, would be with a query parameter. But I suggest to add the query parameter to the books URL (because only nouns, no verbs):
GET /api/v1/books?isbn=12312312301
The better solution? Not sure…
Because you are selecting “one book by id” (except title), rather than performing a query/search, I prefer the first approach (…/books should return “a collection of books” and .../books/{id} should return only one book).
But maybe someone has a better approach/idea?
Edit:
I suggest to avoid adding the identifier to the URL, it has “bad smell”. But is also a possible approach and I saw that a lot in other APIs. Let’s see if I can find some information on that, if its “ok” or should be avoided.
Edit 2:
See REST API DESIGN - Getting a resource through REST with different parameters but same url pattern and REST - supporting multiple possible identifiers
I am trying to figure out the right parameters for ItemSearch such that the API call will return the same result as on the website. Currently I am using these params it is not consistent with the website.
url_params = dict(
Service='AWSECommerceService',
Operation='ItemSearch',
AssociateTag=AMAZON_ASSOCIATETAG,
SearchIndex='All',
AWSAccessKeyId=AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID,
Keywords=keywords,
ResponseGroup='Small,OfferSummary,Images'
)
For example if 'iphone%205s' is put in keywords, the API returns a list of iPhone protectors, while searching on the website gives iPhones as top results.
I am also trying to figure out why this is for book searches. One possible answer I found online was that the websites search feature might use more elaborate queries than just one simple API call. For example, it may take into account other factors into the search (not sure what that might be but it may).
In my field the content is "example".
I want to find not only the exact word "example", I also want to find "examp". How can I do that? Are there any options. Can't find anything.
If you just want to search for objects starting with some string, then just look at Haystack SearchQuerySet API documentation. It resembles the Django QuerySet API, so it is possible to write:
SearchQuerySet().filter(content__startswith='examp')
SearchQuerySet().filter(content__contains='examp')
or whatever you want.
But there is also something deeper in this question. I don't think you really need to. Because of the way search engines works - when someone searches for e.q. 'monitoring' it gets stemmed (it is process of getting something similar to root of the word - so we will have f.e. 'monitor' from 'monitoring') and that will be searched for in fact. Also everything in search indexes gets stemmed, so searching for monitor will return results containing f.e. 'monitors', 'monitoring', 'monitorize' etc.
Say I request
parent/child/child/page-name
in my browser. I want to extract the parent, children as well as page name. Here are the regular expressions I am currently using. There should be no limit as to how many children there are in the url request. For the time being, the page name will always be at the end and never be omitted.
^([\w-]{1,}){1} -> Match parent (returns 'parent')
(/(?:(?!/).)*[a-z]){1,}/ -> Match children (returns /child/child/)
[\w-]{1,}(?!.*[\w-]{1,}) -> Match page name (returns 'page-name')
The more I play with this, the more I feel how clunky this solution is. This is for a small CMS I am developing in ASP Classic (:(). It is sort of like the MVC routing paths. But instead of calling controllers and functions based on the URL request. I would be travelling down the hierarchy and finding the appropriate page in the database. The database is using the nested set model and is linked by a unique page name for each child.
I have tried using the split function to split with a / delimiter however I found I was nested so many split statements together it became very unreadable.
All said, I need an efficient way to parse out the parent, children as well as page name from a string. Could someone please provide an alternative solution?
To be honest, I'm not even sure if a regular expression is the best solution to my problem.
Thank you.
You could try using:
^([\w-]+)(/.*/)([\w-]+)$
And then access the three matching groups created using Match.SubMatches. See here for more details.
EDIT
Actually, assuming that you know that [\w-] is all that is used in the names of the parts, you can use ^([\w-]+)(.*)([\w-]+)$ instead and it will handle the no-child case fine by itself as well.
I just got started looking at using Solr as my search web service. I don't know whether Solr supports these query types:
Startswith
Exact Match
Contain
Doesn't Contain
In the range
Could anyone guide me how to implement those features in Solr?
Cheers,
Samnang
Solr is capable of all those things but to adequately explain how to do each of time an answer would become a mini-manual for Solr.
I'd suggest you read the actual manual and tutorials linked from the Solr homepage.
In short though:
Startswith can be implemented using Lucene wildcards.
Exact matches will only be found if a field is not tokanized. I.e. the entire field is viewed as a single token.
Contain is the default search format. I.e. a search for "John" will find any document's whose search field contains the value "John". Prefixing with - (e.g. "-John" will only find documents that do not contain John).
Ranges (be they date or integer) are possible and quite powerful, example date:[* TO NOW] would find any document whose date is not in the future.