Implementing Payment and Tax System for Open-Event

Post author:aditya1702
Post published:August 10, 2016
Post category:FOSSASIA Open Event
Post comments:0 Comments

So I implemented the payment system and tax system for the payment part in the ticketing system. The first step was making a list of available countries and currency options for the system. So I created and added the following list:

PAYMENT_COUNTRIES = {
    'United States',
    'Argentina',
    'Australia',
    'Austria',
    'Belgium',
    'Brazil',
    'Canada',
    'Cyprus',
    'Czech Republic',
    'Denmark',
    'Estonia',
    'Finland',
    'France',
    'Germany',
    'Greece',
    'Hong Kong',
    'Hungary',
    'Ireland',
    'Israel',
    'Italy',
    'Japan',
    'Latvia',
    'Lithuania',
    'Luxemborg',
    'Malaysia',
    'Malta',
    'Mexico',
    'Netherlands',
    'New Zealand',
    'Norway',
    'Philippines',
    'Poland',
    'Portugal',
    'Singapore',
    'Slovakia',
    'Slovenia',
    'Spain',
    'Sweden',
    'Switzerland',
    'Taiwan',
    'United Kingdom',
}

PAYMENT_CURRENCIES = {
    'ARS Argentine Peso $',
    'AUD Australian Dollars A$',
    'BRL Brazilian Real R$',
    'CAD Canadian Dollars C$',
    'CZK Czech Koruna Kč',
    'DKR Danish Krone Dkr',
    'EUR Euros €',
    'HKD Hong Kong Dollar HK$',
    'HUF Hungarian Forint Ft',
    'ILS Israeli Shekels ₪',
    'JPY Japanese Yen ¥',
    'MYR Malaysian Ringgits RM',
    'MXN Mexican Pesos Mex$',
    'NZD New Zealand Dollar NZ$',
    'NOK Norwegian Krone Nkr',
    'PHP Philippine Pesos ₱',
    'PLN Polish Zloty zł',
    'GBP Pounds Sterling £',
    'SGD Singapore Dollar SG$',
    'SEK Swedish Krona Skr',
    'CHF Swiss Franc Fr',
    'TWD Taiwan New Dollars NT$',
    'THB Thai baht ฿',
    'USD U.S. Dollars $',
}

This is the list of currently supported countries and currencies. Thus the user can choose from the above list in the following step on the first page of event creation:

If the user chooses a Paid ticket or a Donation ticket then he/she has to compulsorily choose a country and a currency for the event. Next in line is the system of payments – the way in which the organizer wants payments to be made for his/her event. They include the option of Online Payments and Offline Payments. The organizer has to tick the checkbox in order to enable the payment option. On enabling the PayPal and Stripe checkboxes he/she is represented with the following:

On enabling PayPal option the organizer has to enter the PayPal email and for Stripe he has to connect it with Stripe account.

And the final step is the addition of tax for the event. The organizer can choose whether he/she wants to enable tax for the event or not:

On choosing Yes he is presented with the tax form:

If the organizer wants to send invoices then on enabling invoices another form is displayed with details pertaining to Business Address, Registered Name etc….

Finally we have two options that whether we want to display the tax as separate fee or include in the price of tickets.

GET and POST requests

Post author:rafalkowalski
Post published:August 8, 2016
Post category:API App generator FOSSASIA GSoC Open Event
Post comments:1 Comment

If you wonder how to get or update page resource, you have to read this article.

It’s trivial if you have basic knowledge about HTTP protocol. I’d like to get you little involved to this subject.

So GET and POST are most useful methods in HTTP protocol.

What is HTTP?

Hypertext transfer protocol – allow us to communicate between client and server side. In Open Event project we use web browser as client and for now we use Heroku for server side.

Difference between GET and POST methods

GET – it allows to get data from specified resources

POST – it allows to submit new data to specified resources for example by html form.

GET samples:

For example we use it to get details about event

curl http://open-event-dev.herokuapp.com/api/v2/events/95

Response from server:

Of course you can use this for another needs, If you are a poker player I suppose that you’d like to know how many percentage you have on hand.

curl http://www.propokertools.com/simulations/show?g=he&s=generic&b&d&h1=AA&h2=KK&h3&h4&h5&h6&_

POST samples:

curl -X POST https://example.com/resource.cgi

You can often find this action in a contact page or in a login page.

How does request look in python?

We use Requests library to communication between client and server side. It’s very readable for developers. You can find great documentation and a lot of code samples on their website. It’s very important to see how it works.

>>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/user', auth=('user', 'pass'))
>>> r.status_code
200

I know that samples are very important, but take a look how Requests library fulfils our requirements in 100%. We have decided to use it because we would like to communicate between android app generator and orga server application. We have needed to send request with params(email, app_name, and api of event url) by post method to android generator resource. It executes the process of sending an email – a package of android application to a provided email address.

data = {
    "email": login.current_user.email,
    "app_name": self.app_name,
    "endpoint": request.url_root + "api/v2/events/" + str(self.event.id)
}
r = requests.post(self.app_link, json=data)

Allowing web-user on apache server to run scripts as root

Post author:the-dagger
Post published:August 6, 2016
Post category:App generator Open Event
Post comments:0 Comments

Allowing web-user on apache server to run scripts as root

If you are new to this, you might be wondering, what the hell is a web user anyways?

So let’s say that you need a server which hosts a simple web page and does a particular task based on data entered into that web-page.

The normal way of doing this is to navigate to /var/www/html and place the web page you want to host here.

You also need to put your php script in this folder so that it is accessible from the website.
This php script will take in the data from your web-page and run the necessary commands that you need to be executed on the server.( I am assuming you are not using “The Real Dev Language” for now. :p )

I will be using a simple web page and script that I have made for this post.

<html>
<head>
  <title>Apk Generator</title>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  <link href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.6/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-1q8mTJOASx8j1Au+a5WDVnPi2lkFfwwEAa8hDDdjZlpLegxhjVME1fgjWPGmkzs7" crossorigin="anonymous">
  <link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:400,100' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
  <link href="css/main.css" rel="stylesheet">
</head>
<body>
<div class="container"><br><br>
<form name="htmlform" id="form" enctype="multipart/form-data" class="col-md-offset-4 col-xs-offset-2 col-xs-8 col-md-4 form-group generator_form" >
  <label for="name">Email</label>
      <input type="email" class="form-control" id="Email" name="Email">
      <br>
      <input type="hidden" id="theme" name="theme" value="light">

      <label for="name">App's Name</label>
      <input type="text" class="form-control" id="App_Name" name="App_Name">
      <br>
      <label> Choose your data source </label>
      <ul style="list-style-type:none">
        <li><input type="radio" name="datasource" value="jsonupload"> Upload your own JSON files </input></li>
        <li><input type="radio" name="datasource" value="eventapi"> API endpoint of event on OpenEvent </input></li>
      </ul>
      <br>
      <section id="eventapi-input" style="display:none;">
        <label for="apiendpoint">Link to Open Event API endpoint</label>
        <input type="url" class="form-control"
        id="Api_Link" name="Api_Link">
      </section>
      <br>
      <section id="jsonupload-input" style="display:none;">
        <input type="file" name="uploadZip" id="uploadZip" class="form-control"/>
        <br>
      </section>
      <br>
      <input type="hidden" name="assetmode" value="download">
      <center>
        <br>
        <div id="status"></div>
        <br>
<tr>
 <td colspan="5" style="text-align:center">
  <button type="submit">Generate and Download app</button>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>
<script src="https://www.gstatic.com/firebasejs/live/3.0/firebase.js"></script>
<script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.1.0.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://code.jquery.com/ui/1.12.0/jquery-ui.js"></script>
<script>
  $('input:radio[name="datasource"]').change(
  function() {
    if ($(this).is(':checked')) {

      if ($(this).val() === 'mockjson') {
        $('#jsonupload-input').hide(100);
        $('#eventapi-input').hide(100);
      }

      if ($(this).val() === 'jsonupload') {
        $('#jsonupload-input').show(100);
        $('#eventapi-input').hide(100);
      }

      if ($(this).val() === 'eventapi') {
        $('#eventapi-input').show(100);
        $('#jsonupload-input').hide(100);
      }
    }
  });
  var $ = jQuery;
  var timestamp = Number(new Date());
  var form = document.querySelector("form");
      form.addEventListener("submit", function(event) {
        event.preventDefault();
        var ary = $(form).serializeArray();
        var obj = {};
        for (var a = 0; a < ary.length; a++) obj[ary[a].name] = ary[a].value;
          console.log("JSON",obj);
        if(obj.Email == "" || obj.App_Name ==""){
          alert("It seems like you forgot to fill up your email address or the app's name");
          setTimeout("location.reload(true);", 1);
        }
        else{
	alert("Please wait while we generate the app, meanwhile you can stick around to directly download it.The app will also be emailed to you."); 
            $.ajax({
              type: "POST",
              url: "/test.php",
              data: { timestamp : timestamp },
              success: function(response){
                console.log("Success",response);
                window.location = response;
              }
            });
        }
      });
    </script>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

This is basically a web page with some inputText widgets which accept response and send it to a php file named test.php on the server via an AJAX post.

<?php
if(isset($_POST['timestamp']))
{
    $uid = escapeshellcmd($_POST['timestamp']);
    exec("sudo sh /var/www/email.sh $uid");
}
?>

This php script will call a bash script which in turns an email to me with the user’s timestamp as the subject.

Well, here is where the problem arises, as I am trying to run the bash file as root.

You might wonder as to why is this such a big issue?
Why can’t we do that?

Well, we can surely do that on the server but the point to be noted here is that we are not running this script directly from the server.

We are running it from a web page which is hosted on a server.

So our user here is a web user aka www-data rather than being a root user.

The web user is not provided root access by default, but there are ways to get this done.

Solution 1 :

Allow the web user to run only specific scripts as root.

Please note that this is not a ideal workaround.
Ideally your web user should not have root access in any case.
Since that’s cleared up, lets proceed.

This can be done by editing your sudoers list and adding www-data to it.
Open up your terminal and enter the following command.

sudo visudo

Next up, navigate to the end of the file and add the following command there

www-data = (root) NOPASSWD: /path/to/script.sh

In case you have to execute one script as root which in turn executes some more scripts as root, you don’t need to set the path to all of them over here.
Doing it only for the parent script will do the job.

Solution 2 :

Using SuExec

DigitalOcean blog has a very good article on how to execute python scripts as root via the web user through cgi.

You can go through the article here :https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-suexec-in-apache-to-run-cgi-scripts-on-an-ubuntu-vps

Well, that was all about my findings on properly handling sudo requirements for your web user on your apache server.

I’ll be adding more solutions as I find them along the way.
Meanwhile feel free to comment below your thoughts, suggestions and queries.

Cheers.

Integrating Stripe in the Flask web framework

Post author:Niranjan Rajendran
Post published:August 6, 2016
Post category:FOSSASIA GSoC Tutorial
Post comments:0 Comments

{ Repost from my personal blog @ https://blog.codezero.xyz/integrating-stripe-in-flask }

Stripe is a developer and a user-friendly payment infrastructure provider. Stripe provides easy to use SDKs in different programming languages allowing us to easily collect payments on our website or mobile application.

Flask is a web microframework for Python based on Werkzeug, Jinja 2. Flask makes building web applications in python a breeze.

Make sure you have your Flask app ready. Let’s start with installing the required dependency. The Stripe python SDK. You can get it by running.

pip install stripe

Don’t forget to add the same in your requirements.txt. (if you have one that is.)

Now, head over to Stripe: Register and create a new Stripe account to get your test keys. If you don’t wish to create an account at this time, you can use the following test keys, but you’ll not be able to see the payments in the stripe dashboard.

Publishable Key: pk_test_6pRNASCoBOKtIshFeQd4XMUh
Secret Key: sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2

We’ll need to set the secret key in the SDK.

import stripe

STRIPE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY = 'pk_test_6pRNASCoBOKtIshFeQd4XMUh'  
STRIPE_SECRET_KEY = 'sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2'

stripe.api_key = STRIPE_SECRET_KEY

Let’s create a page with a form for us to handle the Stripe payment.

<!DOCTYPE html>  
<html>  
<head>  
    <title>Pay now</title>
</head>  
<body>  
    <h4>Pay $250.00 by clicking on the button below.</h4>
    <form action="/payment" method="POST">
        <script src="https://checkout.stripe.com/checkout.js" 
                class="stripe-button"
                data-key="pk_test_6pRNASCoBOKtIshFeQd4XMUh"
                data-description="A payment for the Hello World project"
                data-name="HelloWorld.com"
                data-image="/images/logo/hw_project.png"
                data-amount="25000"></script>
    </form>
</body>  
</html>

We’re using Stripe’s Checkout library to get the payment details from the user and process. Also, keep in mind that the checkout library has to be loaded directly from https://checkout.stripe.com/checkout.js. Downloading it and serving locally will not work.

The script tag, accepts a lot of parameters. A few important ones are,

data-key – The Publishable Key.
data-amount – The amount to be charged to the user in the lowest denomination of the currency. (For example, 5 USD should be represented as 500 cents)
data-name – The name of your site or company that will be displayed to the user.
data-image – The path to an image file (maybe a logo) that you’d like to be displayed to the user.

More configuration options can be seen at Stripe: Detailed Checkout Guide.

This script would automatically create a Pay with Card button which would open the stripe Checkout lightbox when clicked by the user.

Once the payment process is completed the following parameters are submitted to the form’s action endpoint (the form inside which this script is located), along with any other elements that were in the form.

stripeToken – The ID of the token representing the payment details
stripeEmail – The email address the user entered during the Checkout process

Along with the Billing address details and Shipping address details if applicable and enabled

We’ll need to write a Flask method to handle the input that were submitted by Stripe to proceed with the transaction and charge the user.

Let’s add a new Flask route to respond when submitting the form.

@app.route('/payment', methods=['POST'])
def payment_proceed():  
    # Amount in cents
    amount = 25000

    customer = stripe.Customer.create(
        email=request.form['stripeEmail'],
        source=request.form['stripeToken']
    )

    charge = stripe.Charge.create(
        amount=amount,
        currency='usd',
        customer=customer.id,
        description='A payment for the Hello World project'
    )

    return render_template('payment_complete.html')

We’re now creating a new Stripe customer along with the stripeToken as the source parameter. The card details are stored by stripe as a token. And using this token ID, Stripe will be able to retrieve it to make the charge.

We’re creating a charge object with the amount in the lowest denomination of the currency, the currency name, the customer ID, and an optional description. This will charge the customer. On a successful transaction, a charge object would be returned. Else, an exception will be thrown.

For more information regarding the Charge object and the various other APIs available fro consumption in Stripe, checkout the Stripe API Guide.

Sending mails using Sendgrid on Nodejs

Post author:championswimmer
Post published:August 4, 2016
Post category:App generator FOSSASIA GSoC Open Event

The open-event webapp generator project needs to send an email to the user notifying him whenever generating the webapp is finished, containing the links to the preview and zip download.

For sending emails, the easiest service we found we could use was SendGrid which provides upto 15000 free emails a month for students who have a Github Education Pack. (It anyway provides 10000 free emails to all users).

To use sendgrid, it’s best to use the sendgrid npm module that SendGrid officially builds. To get that installed just use the following command –

npm install --save sendgrid

Also, once you have made an account on Sendgrid, create an API key, and save it as an environment variable (so that your API key is not exposed in your code). For example in our project, we save it in the environment variable SENDGRID_API_KEY
To make it permanent you can add it to your ~/.profile file

export SEDGRID_API_KEY=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The actual sending takes place in the mailer.js script in our project.

Basically we are using the mail helper class provided in the sendgrid module, and the bare minimum code required to send a mail is as follows

  var helper = require('sendgrid').mail
  from_email = new helper.Email('test@example.com')
  to_email = new helper.Email('test@example.com')
  subject = 'Hello World from the SendGrid Node.js Library!'
  content = new helper.Content('text/plain', 'Hello, Email!')
  mail = new helper.Mail(from_email, subject, to_email, content)
 
  var sg = require('sendgrid')(process.env.SENDGRID_API_KEY);
  var request = sg.emptyRequest({
    method: 'POST',
    path: '/v3/mail/send',
    body: mail.toJSON()
  });
 
  sg.API(request, function(error, response) {
    console.log(response.statusCode)
    console.log(response.body)
    console.log(response.headers)
  })

You need to replace the to and from emails to your requirements.

Also as you can see in our project’s code, if you want to send HTML formatted data, you can change the content type from text/plain to text/html and then add any html content (as a string) into the content.

Testing Docker Deployment using Travis

Post author:Avi Aryan
Post published:August 3, 2016
Post category:GSoC Open Event

Hello. This post is about how to setup automated tests to check if your application’s docker deployment is working or not. I used it extensively while working on the Docker deployment of the Open Event Server. In this tutorial, we will use Travis CI as the testing service.

To start testing your github project for Docker deployment, first add the repo to Travis. Then create a.travis.yml in the project’s root directory.

In that file, add docker to services.

services:
  - docker

The above will enable docker in the testing environment. It will also include docker-compose by default.

Next step is to build your app and run it. Since this is a pre-testing step, we will add it in the install directive.

install:
  - docker build -t myapp .
  - docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:80:4000 --name myapp myapp

The 4000 in the above text is assuming your app runs on port 4000 inside the container. Also it is assumed that Dockerfile is in the root of the repo.

So now that the docker app is running, it’s time to test it.

script:
  - docker ps | grep -i myapp

The above will test if our app is in one of the running docker processes. It is a basic test to see if the app is running or not.

We can go ahead and test the app’s functionality with some sample requests. Create a file test.py with the following contents.

import requests

r = requests.get('http://127.0.0.1/')
assert 'HomePage' in r.content, 'No homepage loaded'

Then run it as a test.

script:
  - docker ps | grep -i myapp
  - python test.py

You can make use of the unittest module in Python to bundle and create more organized tests. The limit is the sky here.

In the end, the .travis.yml will look something like the following

language: python
python:
  - "2.7"

install:
  - docker build -t myapp .
  - docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:80:4000 --name myapp myapp

script:
  - docker ps | grep -i myapp
  - python test.py

So this is it. A basic tutorial on testing Docker deployments using the awesome Travis CI service.

Feel free to share it and comment your views.

{{ Repost from my personal blog http://aviaryan.in/blog/gsoc/docker-test.html }}

Programmer principles

Post author:rafalkowalski
Post published:August 2, 2016
Post category:Event Management FOSSASIA Open Event

As programmers we develop our programming skills and learn something every single day. We write code and solve many troubles. But is our aim to simply write code? I am sure it is not. I think writing code just for doing it is not interesting, and it’s definitely not Open Event team’s objective. Personally, I like reading code like a poem. We should always try to eliminate bad practises and ugly code. There are a few principles how to do it. Let me share them with you now.

SOLID principle

SOLID is a mnemonic acronym introduced by Michael Feathers, and it simply means five basic principles of object oriented programming. These principles, when applied together, make it more likely that a programmer will create a system that is easy to maintain and extend over time. They are guidelines that can be applied while working on software to remove code smells by causing the programmer to refactor the software’s source code. It is also a part of an overall strategy of agile. So, here they are:

S – Single responsibility principle

This principle means that there should never be more than one reason for a class to change.

In other words, a class should have only one potential change in a software’s specification. You should not add everything into your class. The best practise here is to check if the logic you are introducing should be in this class or not. Responsibility is the heart of this principle, so to rephrase there should never be more than one responsibility per class. Use layers for a help. And try to divide big classes into smaller ones.

O – Open/closed principle

Software entities like classes, module and functions should be open for extension, but closed for modification.

All of them should be private by default.

To make an object behaving differently without modifying it use abstractions, or place behavior(responsibility) in derivative classes. If properties of the abstracted class need to be compared or organized together, another abstraction should handle this. This is the basis of the “keep all object variables private” argument.

L – Liskov substitution principle

Functions that use pointers or references to base classes have to be able to use objects of derived classes without knowing/alerting the correctness of a program

A great example you can find here. If you are using a method defined at a base class upon an abstracted class, the function must be implemented properly on the subtype class. A great example provided here http://williamdurand.fr/2013/07/30/from-stupid-to-solid-code/ you can find below.

“ A rectangle is a plane figure with four right angles. It has a width, and a height. Now, take a look at the following pseudo-code:

rect = new Rectangle();

rect.width = 10;
rect.height = 20;

assert 10 == rect.width
assert 20 == rect.height

We simply set a width and a height on a Rectangle instance, and then we assert that both properties are correct. So far, so good.

Now we can improve our definition by saying that a rectangle with four sides of equal length is called a square. A square is a rectangle so we can create aSquare class that extends the Rectangle one, and replace the first line above by the one below:

rect = new Square();

According to the definition of a square, its width is equal to its height. Can you spot the problem? The first assertion will fail because we had to change the behavior of the setters in the Square class to fit the definition “

I – Interface segregation principle

Many client-specific interfaces are better than one general-purpose interface.

Implementing methods that you don’t use is not recommended in this way. The idea here is to keep your components focused and try to minimize the dependencies between them. Enforcing that principle gives you low coupling, and high cohesion.

D – Dependency inversion principle

This means that “one should depends upon abstractions, do not depend upon concretions”

Interfaces should depend on other interfaces. Don’t add concrete classes to method signatures of an interface. However, use interfaces in your class methods.

So, we can also say that rather than working with classes that are tight coupled, use interfaces. This reduces dependency on implementation specifics and makes code more reusable.

Why SOLID?

I hope all of you understand the importance of using SOLID principles in your everyday code practise. Finally, let me underline again the main arguments why you should starting following them now. The most important thing is that thanks to them you can create easy to maintain software, then you can reuse your code, and finally it helps you to test easier. Do you need anymore to be persuaded to do it? I think it’s that’s crucial advantages and they are enough.

Source:

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID_(programowanie_obiektowe)

https://scotch.io/bar-talk/s-o-l-i-d-the-first-five-principles-of-object-oriented-design

http://williamdurand.fr/2013/07/30/from-stupid-to-solid-code/

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/60845/The-S-O-L-I-D-Object-Oriented-Programming-OOP-Prin

Creating an API in PHP

Post author:the-dagger
Post published:August 2, 2016
Post category:Android API App generator FOSSASIA GSoC Tutorial

One of the key components of my GSoC Project was to have a POST API for the Android App generator.

This was required so that the app generator could be plugged into the server and can be called directly instead of someone manually visiting the webpage and entering his/her details.

It takes in a JSON input and compiles and emails the app to the organizer based on his email address in the input JSON.

The input to the API will look something like this :

{
“email”: “harshithdwivedi@gmail.com”,
“app_name”: “MyApp”,
“endpoint”: “https://open-event-dev.herokuapp.com/api/v2”
}

Once the data is sent, on the server I have a php file which intercepts the requests and performs an action based on the request.

<?php
function sendResponse($data) {
    header('Content-type: application/json');
    echo json_encode($data);
    die();
}
/* If the request isn't a POST request then send an error message*/
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] != 'POST') {
    sendResponse([
        "status"=>"error",
        "code"=>405,
        "message"=>"Method Not Allowed",
    ]);
}
/* Store the input received in a variable named body */
$body = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true);
/* If the user is nissing any important input parameters, don't process the request */
if (!array_key_exists('email', $body) || !array_key_exists('app_name', $body) || !array_key_exists('endpoint', $body)) {
    sendResponse([
        "status"=>"error",
        "code"=>422,
        "message"=>"Unprocessable entity",
    ]);
}
$uid = mt_rand(1000,9999). "_" .time();  //A random User ID
/* Extracting variables from the body */
$email = escapeshellcmd($body['email']);
$appName = escapeshellcmd($body["app_name"]); 
$endpoint = escapeshellcmd($body["endpoint"]);

/* Run a script based on the input parameters */
exec("sudo python /var/www/html/api/appgenserver.py $email $appName $endpoint");

The code above is pretty much self explanatory.

So basically, first we check for a valid request (GET/POST) and throw an error if it is invalid.

Next up, for a valid request we store the body into a variable and then execute a followup script as per our needs using data from this response.

This PHP file should be located in the public-html (/var/www/data) of the server so as to be accessible from outside of the server.

You can test out this API by calling it directly by prepending the server’s ip address to the name of php file containing this code.

Something like :

domain-name.com/api/api.php

You can also use Postman for Chrome or RESTClient for Firefox for making API calls easily.

Well, that’s it then!

You can easily modify the PHP code provided and modify it to suite your needs for making you own API.

Let me know your thoughts and your queries in the “response” 😉 below.

Until next time.

Mark Notifications Read on Click

Post author:saptaks
Post published:August 1, 2016
Post category:Event Management FOSSASIA Open Event

Notification has become a really important way of informing users about the various activities related to them in web apps. There are different types of notification such as web app notification, email notification, desktop notification, push notification, etc. We are going to primarily talk about web app notification and mainly about how to mark them as read.

Create Notification

Creating a notification is plain and simple. You have a json or an object which stores the notification message corresponding to a particular activity. Whenever that activity occurs in the backend, you call the send notification module, which adds the information to the database and shows it in the notification page. As simple as that.

Marking Notification as Read

The main functioning of this is plain and simple as well. You have a URL, which on getting a request from the user, marks the notification as read in the database. That’s it.

We know how to do this using a button or a link. But the question here is how to mark a notification as read on clicking any part of the notification?? The obvious answer is, well, put the entire notification inside an anchor tag and you are done, right? Well, it would work in many cases. But what if the design structure is such that this doesn’t work somehow. Somehow enclosing the notification inside a particular anchor tag doesn’t solve the purpose. What do we do then?

Identify Whether Inside a DIV

The main problem here actually is how to identify whether the click is inside the enclosing div or somewhere else. Once we solve this problem, we can send an ajax request to the mark read URL and our job is done.

So, to identify that a click is indeed inside a div, we use the event.target property of the event clicked. The target event property returns the element that triggered the event. So we check whether event.target has the “notification” class in our case. If it does not have the “notification” class we check in all it’s parent nodes. We get the parent nodes using the “parent()” function and check whether any of that has notification. If either of the 2 occurs, we consider that the click is inside the div. And thus mark the notification as read.

So, once this is done, we mark the notification as read in the backend and our job is done…

UI Testing in Android

Post author:Manan Wason
Post published:August 1, 2016
Post category:FOSSASIA

Testing in android is something that most people simply don’t do. When I first started with developing android apps, I followed the same dev cycle :

Develop a feature
deploy to a device
manual testing for bugs and errors
fix these issues due to wrong implementation
then again deploy and manually test and so on……

Trust me it’s a tedious process and no one actually can test for the corner cases that may arise. You may be able to cover like 85% of the cases for each feature but when there are a ton of features you’ll collectively cover much less than 85% as well. So, We should definitely write tests for android. I’ll start with Espresso testing first.

Quote from the Android developer website:

“Testing user interactions within a single app helps to ensure that users do not encounter unexpected results or have a poor experience when interacting with your app. You should get into the habit of creating user interface (UI) tests if you need to verify that the UI of your app is functioning correctly.

The Espresso testing framework, provided by the Android Testing Support Library, provides APIs for writing UI tests to simulate user interactions within a single target app. Espresso tests can run on devices running Android 2.2 (API level 8) and higher. A key benefit of using Espresso is that it provides automatic synchronization of test actions with the UI of the app you are testing. Espresso detects when the main thread is idle, so it is able to run your test commands at the appropriate time, improving the reliability of your tests. This capability also relieves you from having to adding any timing workarounds, such as a sleep period, in your test code.

The Espresso testing framework is an instrumentation-based API and works with theAndroidJUnitRunner test runner.”

Getting started

We first need to setup espresso in android studio. That can be done by adding this to the app level build.gradle

dependencies {
    ...
    androidTestCompile 'com.android.support.test.espresso:espresso-core:2.2.1'
}

After adding this dependency and setting up testing on android, now we can move on to write some tests. We start by adding a new class in androidTest where we will actually write the tests. There are 3 parts to writing an espresso test :

ViewMatchers: Find a view to act/assert upon something
ViewActions: something to perform an action(click, type etc.)
ViewAssertion: something to verify what you expect

Components

For writing tests in espresso we just have to use these three parts to see if the ui is working as it should.

Let’s say we want to type some text in an edittext and see if the text we have typed is as we expect it to be.

To start, we’ll see how we use viewMatchers. We need to find a view in ViewMatchers. For that, we will do something like this
```
withId(R.id.edittext_id)
```
Now we perform a click on this eddittext
```
perform(typeText("Hello"))
```
Now we join the two by wrapping in onView()
```
onView(withId(R.id.edittext_id)).perform(typetext("Hello"))
```
This will just type “Hello” in the edittext with the id eddittext_id, now we need to check if this is what was actually expected, for that we will have to further a viewAssertion on this like this :
```
onView(withText("Hello")).check(matches(isDisplayed()));
```
This is a cheatsheet that shows various methods that can be used in espresso.

So this is how we can perform basic ui tests using espresso. Mainly people face the issue of deciding on the views that we have to perform this action on. Just think of the 3 components that we have previously talked about (View matching, View action and View assertions), if you think a view can have all three of these, then you can write a test for it. Go ahead and try it for yourself. Cheers!
References