Web Service Plugin

guinness · Post by **guinness** » March 18th, 2006, 4:25 am

A plugin is now available to display information from Web Services via LCD Smartie. This may be downloaded for free at http://www.baruba.com/lcdsmartie.htm and includes source code.

Edit: the plugin is hosted now on the forums...
scroll down the replies and find the Limbo's message

krio77 · Post by **krio77** » March 18th, 2006, 9:45 am

For the noobs, like me

Good you give us some explications and some examples plz ?

Because, this plugin must have lots of possibilities...but the dedicated website is not really easy to understand !

Thks

guinness · Post by **guinness** » March 18th, 2006, 7:55 pm

No problem, I can provide a working example. I must caution though that to use this plugin effectively you need both working knowledge of XML and web services.

The main benefit of this plugin would be for users to create their own web services (which can also reside on another computer) to be used by LCD Smartie.

First off, you need to find a web service to consume. A directory of web services can be found at http://www.xmethods.net/ and are mostly free.

When you find one to use, you must first test it by using a web browser to see the XML that is returned. Here is an example for getting the currency conversion rate from British Pounds to US Dollars:

http://www.webservicex.com/CurrencyConv ... rrency=USD

You must then take breakdown this URL to be used by the plugin in the following steps:

1) Add the following section to the WEBSVC.ini file in the plugins folder.

Code: Select all

[Service 04]
URI=http://www.webservicex.com/CurrencyConvertor.asmx
Operation=ConversionRate
MinsInCache=1440

2) In LCD Smartie, use the following call to the plugin to show the exchange rate on your LCD.

Code: Select all

$dll(WEBSVC,4,FromCurrency=GBP&ToCurrency=USD,/def:double)

The tricky part is determining the last parameter. When you have the XML result from testing, you then need to know what XML element you want to display in LCD Smartie. You can use a tool like Buba XPath Builder to determine the correct XPath query to use.

Since the web service XML response is cached in the plugin, you can repeatably call the plugin with no performance hit. This is typically important if you have an XML response that contains several XML elements that you want to show, for example a weather web service.

krio77 · Post by **krio77** » March 19th, 2006, 8:54 am

OK, thanks for the response !

I'm going to work on it.

andye26 · Post by **andye26** » December 1st, 2008, 5:34 pm

Hi
Any idea where I can find this plugin?

Andy

schmidtbag · Post by **schmidtbag** » January 1st, 2009, 12:45 am

the link is dead

Post by **limbo** » January 1st, 2009, 11:37 pm

I have uploaded the plugin to forums