partigirb

A Ruby wrapper for the Partigi API, adapted from Grackle by Hayes Davis.

What is Partigi?

Partigi is a service that helps you choose your next cultural items, share short reviews and keep track of what you have consumed and own.

The Partigi API is an almost-REST based Atom API where we offer you almost all data and functionality that you have in the website.

There is also a complete documentation of the API.

Install

gem install oauth
gem install partigirb -s http://gemcutter.org

Usage

Creating a client

Since Partigi started to require OAuth in all its API requests they support two authorization modes: the common OAuth specification (http://oauth.net/core/1.0a/) for read-write access and OAuth with a slightly modification for read-only access, which just consists of skiping the oauth_token when signing the requests.

Regardless of the access method used you will need to register your application and get a consumer_key and a consumer_secret, used in both access methods. (http://www.partigi.com/applications)

Read-only access

client = Partigirb::Client.new('consumer_key', 'consumer_secret')

Read-write access

client = Partigirb::Client.new('consumer_key', 'consumer_secret')
client.set_callback_url('http://myapplication.test/partigi')
request_token = client.request_token

# At this point we must redirect the user to Partigi so he can authorize our application to access
# his profile, we can get the authorization url with request_token.authorize_url

# Once we are back Partigi will give us the parameter oauth_verifier, which we will use
# to get the access token
client.authorize_from_request(request_token.token, request_token.secret, oauth_verifier)

# Now our client is fully authorized to call write methods for the user

Request methods

A request to Partigi servers is done by translating Partigi URL paths into a set of chained method calls, just changing slashes by dots. Each call is used to build the request URL until a format call is found which causes the request to be sent. In order to specify the HTTP method use:

• ? for HTTP GET
• ! for HTTP POST (in this case you will need to use a client with authentication)

A request is not performed until either you add the above signs to your last method call or you use a format method call.

Note: Any method call that is not part of a valid API request path will be chained to the request that Partigirb sends to the server, so that when the client finds a format call (method call ending with ? or !) a wrong request will be sent and a PartigiError will be raised. For example:

  client.wrong.items.index?

or

  client.wrong
  client.items.index?

In the second case we do the wrong call and the right one in separated sentences, however the wrong call is chained anyway (in that case the client method clear may be used to flush the chain).

Formats

The response format is specified by a method call with the format name (atom, json or xml). Notice that the only format fully implemented on Partigi API at the moment is atom, which is the default used by the wrapper.

Example requests

The simplest way of executing a GET request is to use the ? notation, using the default format.

client.users.show? :id => 'johnwayne'     # http://www.partigi.com/api/v1/users/show.atom?id=johnwayne

Also you can force the format:

client.users.show.json? :id => 'johnwayne' # http://www.partigi.com/api/v1/users/show.json?id=johnwayne

For POST requests just change ? by !:

client.reviews.update! :id => 123, :status => 1 # POST to http://www.partigi.com/api/v1/reviews/update.atom

Parameter handling

• All parameters are URL encoded as necessary.
• If you use a File object as a parameter it will be POSTed to Partigi in a multipart request.
• If you use a Time object as a parameter, .httpdate will be called on it and that value will be used

Return values

The returned values are always OpenStruct objects (wrapped in Partigirb::PartigiStruct) containing the response values as attributes.

If the response contains several entries the client returns an Array of OpenStruct objects.

When using Atom format Partigi returns some XML elements using namespaces. In those cases the elements are mapped to attributes by convention, for example: namespaceName:attribute becomes namespaceName_attribute

Special cases

There are two special cases to be aware of in regard to PartigiStruct:

• Every attribute which name is equal to any of the Ruby Object methods (e.g type) will be mapped to a method on the struct starting with an underscore (e.g _type).

• XML elements that appear repeated with different type values will turn into a unique struct with one method per type. For instance:

  <content type="text">Some text</content>
  <content type="html"><p>Some html</p></content>
  

Will be accessed by result.content.text and result.content.html, both returning a ruby string.

Error handling

In case Partigi returns an error response, this is turned into a PartigiError object which message attribute is set to the error string returned in the XML response.

Verifying our credentials

A way to check if our client is correctly authorized for write access or to just get the current user's information is by using the verify_credentials method, which will return either the PartigiStruct object with user's information or a PartigiError object in case of authorization failure.

client.verify_credentials

Requirements

• json
• mime-types

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2009 Alvaro Bautista & Fernando Blat, released under MIT license