[Gambas-user] Request for advice

[bb]

On Mon, 2021-07-12 at 14:22 -0400, T Lee Davidson wrote:
> On 7/12/21 1:25 PM, John Dovey wrote:
> > I am working on wrapping theTelegram bot API in Gambas (as
> > recommended
> > here before) but I'm not sure of a few things in the best approach.
> > 
> [snip]
> > Some of the questions I have include:
> > - does this make sense as a way to do this?
> 
> It looks sensible to me. There are a couple things I might do a bit
> differently, but what you have obviously works (though I 
> don't see where 'botMe' was declared).
> 
> One thing I would do is, since you've defined hClient globally, set
> it's unchanging parameters once and reuse it. Second, I'd 
> define one universal function to retrieve the response and return a
> collection. See the code further down below.
> 
> 
> > - What is the best way to store the returned collection?
> 
> As a collection? Do you see something wrong with that? For whatever
> state data needs to be maintained, you can declare as many 
> collections as you need to store response data from the only 50-some
> respective methods. And, the values are very easy to access.
> 
> 
> [code]
> Public Token as string = "xxx"
> Public apiURL As String = "https://api.telegram.org/bot" & Token &
> "/"
> Public hClient As HttpClient
> 'Public cmdResponse As String
> 'Public cmdJSON As Collection
> Public MyBot, ImaginaryData as Collection
> 
> Public Sub Main()
> 
>      hClient = New HttpClient As "hClient"
>      hClient.Async = False
>      hClient.Timeout = 60
> 
>      ' Get my bot's ID
>      MyBot = getResponse("getMe")
>      If MyBot Then ' May need to use "If Not IsNull(MyBot) Then"
> here. My recall is sometimes faulty.
>          Print MyBot["id"]
>      Else
>          Print "ERROR"
>      End If
> 
>      ' Get data from imaginary method
>      ImaginaryData = getResponse("virtData")
>      If ImaginaryData Then Print ImaginaryData["ether"]
> 
> End
> 
> Public Sub getResponse(sMethod) as Variant
> 
>      Dim sBuffer as String
>      Dim respJSON as Collection
> 
>      hClient.URL = apiURL & sMethod
>      hClient.Get
> 
>      Print "Begin"
>      If hClient.Status < 0 Then
>          Print "ERROR"
>      Else
>          ' Success - read the data
>          If Lof(hClient) Then sBuffer = Read #hClient, Lof(hClient)
>          Print sBuffer
>          'cmdResponse = sBuffer
>      End If
>      Try respJSON = JSON.Decode(sBuffer)
>      If Error Then Return Null
>      Return respJSON
>      Print "End"
> End
> [/code]
> 
> 
> One other thing: if there is the possibility for the API to return a
> JSON object with null values, you will want to use 
> JSONCollection as opposed to the Gambas native Collection.
> 
> 
Hi Lee,

I had a quick look at their "API". It is just a pure JSON service. So
maybe John is over complicating things there. Without spending more
time, couldn't he just let the xml/JSON components do the heavy lifting
and just leave the "API" responses as JSON objects until such times as
they are needed somewhere in the code.
BTW is that "null" you say in the last paragraph one of those JSON_null
things? or a real null?

b