Best Practice for API use on Fibaro?

[ipsofacto 8]

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I tend to be a little lazy when using API calls from LUA in VD and Scenes.   I also recently spotted "api.get" in some posts but have seen any information on that in ip/docs or the various fibaro websites.  For those that are considerably more professional in the LUA and Fibaro development than me, could you comment on your best practice e.g. error handling, debugging, parsing JSON etc.  I will try to curate and consolidate in the first entry of this topic for everyone's benefit.

 

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by the prolific 

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Also,  I should of thought Wikipedia for HTTP error codes. 

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So perhaps comment away on the extract from my announcer VD that uses jishi SONOS API bridge below and lets make that a good example of best practice for those learning the ropes (me included)?   

 

thanks in advance

 

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Edited September 10, 2017 by ipsofacto
update with the tutorial

[ipsofacto 8]

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A bit belt and braces.  Perhaps not worth it once everything is humming along reliably.   In this case,  I have inconsistent response from the Sonos Bridge API on SAYALL commands ... 500 is all I get back in any case.

 

Also check the following which I will add to as I discover other helpful existing materials.

 

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3. tbc

 

I would note that (2) seems to suggest that api.post api.get etc.  are scene and VD compatible (check Sankotronic's responses)

 

it is nice that the documentation is so up to date ... not helpful for the amateur non-reselling community here...

Edited September 11, 2017 by ipsofacto
Revising for added existing materials.

[petergebruers 1,261]

Regarding your topic title. My best practices when I want to interface to some device, using http and related protocols:

• Definitely check if the response from a web server is 200. Always. Display at least numerical return code if it is not. Without this, you will always wonder "is it my code, or is it the web server / web interface". Watch out for timeouts and special encoding, like chunked encoding.
• Do not attempt to construct JSON, XML, HTTP yourself. JSON is easy: convert from (and to) a table with json.decode. Remember: HTTP is sensitive to special characters like 1 and > and <. This is a contrived example: Debug(true, "Blue", "A <DIV> B").
• Sometimes you need urlencode to construct a valid url.
• If you want to post to a form, you might want to have a look at my post here: 

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• Use pcall to catch errors from JSON. pcall is standard Lua. Regarding pcall, you can find examples here if you use "search".

[Dave_H 52]

Bear in mind that api.get, api.put etc are only for making an API call to the HC2, for situations where there is no equivalent fibaro: command (such as creating global variables).  You can't use them for connecting to external devices as you're attempting to do.  However, as you mention, they're scene and VD agnostic so will run on both, unlike the Net.FHttp (VD only) and net.HTTPClient (Scene only) calls which aren't interchangeable.

 

 

[ipsofacto 8]

thanks. Api.xxx is for internal HC use only ... been offline for some months and it was new to me this week - a classic chance Fibaro discovery from the forums!