Quimby

Formerly named after a pop star whose lawyers decided they didn't like us using his name.

It's a Foursquare API wrapper. It uses objects instead of hashes, and tries to be smart about when to load things.

Installation

Install it as a gem (in your Gemfile) and its dependencies:

gem "json"
gem "typhoeus"
gem "quimby"

Usage

For a good start, check out the example Rails app: github.com/pierrevalade/foursquare-rails-examples

Get a foursquare:

foursquare = Foursquare::Base.new("ACCESS_TOKEN")

You can also user client_id and client_secret

foursquare = Foursquare::Base.new("CLIENT_ID", "CLIENT_SECRET")

Authentication

First, you need to register your application.

Web server application

Get a foursquare with your client_id and client_secret

foursquare = Foursquare::Base.new("CLIENT_ID", "CLIENT_SECRET")

Redirect users to the Foursquare authentication page. You need to pass your callback_url. Get the url to redirect to with:

foursquare.authorize_url("CALLBACK_SESSION_URL")

Then Foursquare will redirect the user to your callback url with a code parameter in the url. Exchange this code for an access token using:

access_token = foursquare.access_token(params["code"], "CALLBACK_SESSION_URL")

Now you can get a foursquare using only an access token and make requests on user's behalf:

foursquare = Foursquare::Base.new("ACCESS_TOKEN")

Users

Find a user:

user = foursquare.users.find("USER_ID")

Now we've got a Foursquare::User object. You can call sweet methods like user.name and even user.last_checkin. In general, Quimby's Foursquare object methods are just snake-cased versions of the attributes returned in the JSON. Now let's accidentally that user's friends:

user.friends

This will return an array of Foursquare::User objects. Don't worry about the fact that they're populated by limited JSON. Quimby will fetch the extra JSON if you need it. For example:

friend = user.friends.first
friend.name # Will not trigger a network call, since we already have it
friend.twitter # Will trigger a network to load the user's contact information

Checkins

But wait, Foursquare isn't just users! It's checkins too! So let's find some checkins:

user.checkins

Now we have an array of Foursquare::Checkin objects. We can also grab a specific checkin:

checkin = foursquare.checkins.find("CHECKIN_ID")

You also have a convenient method if you want to get all the user checkins:

user.all_checkins

Venues

We can get at a checkin's venue by calling checkin.venue. Pretty easy, RIGHT? Right. If you want to find a venue directly, here ya go:

foursquare.venues.find("VENUE_ID")

You can also search venues:

foursquare.venues.search(:ll => "40.7236307,-73.9999479") # Returns all resulting groups
foursquare.venues.nearby(:ll => "40.7236307,-73.9999479") # Returns only nearby venues
foursquare.venues.trending(:ll => "40.7236307,-73.9999479") # Returns only trending venues
foursquare.venues.favorites(:ll => "40.7236307,-73.9999479") # Returns only favorite venues

The :ll option is required for venue searches. You can also feel free to pass any of the other available Foursquare API options, as specified in the docs.

Logging

If you want to see what's going on up in there, you can set Foursquare.verbose to true

Foursquare.verbose = true

Right now it'll log to STDOUT. Maybe I'll add nicer logging later. If you're lucky. In the meantime, if you want to use your own logger, and you're kind of a jerk like me, you can do something like this:

Foursquare.verbose = true
def Foursquare.log(message)
  Rails.logger.info("[foursquare] #{message}") # HAX, SORRY BRANDON
end

TODO

• Creating checkins works, but it should really return notifications. Also, if the checkin can't be created, it should return errors.
• I don't know, so much other stuff.