Viewing weather forecast of each location from a listbox control

[jrmplus]

Is there a straightforward way to view the weather forecast for a location after selecting it from a list in a UX control?

I have an account at www.myweather2.com which provides a request URL to obtain the weather forecast for any location. The last few characters of the url is the location/postcode, so changing this accordingly will display the forecast for potentially any location.

Can I have a list box of locations which will have a column of postcode/zip code (appended to the request url) and after selecting from this list, scroll to another UX panel card displaying the weather forecast for that particular location? Perhaps in a text box/iframe, etc?

Will this involve a lot of jquery/xbasic, etc, or has Alpha any easier way to accomplish this? I've had a look at the twitter API example using JSON to get twitter feeds - do I need to do something similar?

Thanks

[Steve Workings]

Re: Viewing weather forecast of each location from a listbox control

I use a similar API with WUnderground.com. You should be able to get most or even all of this done as an AJAX Callback, so Xbasic is your ticket. Here's a snippet from one of my functions:

x = "http://api.wunderground.com/api/27a73e6682e85732/geolookup/conditions/forecast/q/" + vlat + "," + vlon + ".json"
y = http_get(x)
z = y.body
<<%a%
	......snippet of returned text:
	"weather":"Clear",
	"temperature_string":"86 F (30.0 C)",
	"relative_humidity":"70%",
	"wind_string":"From the ESE at 5 MPH Gusting to 12.0 MPH",
	"pressure_mb":"1017",
	"dewpoint_string":"75 F (24 C)",
	"heat_index_string":"95 F (35 C)",
	......
%a%

From there, you just parse the text into a string you want, then do whatever fits your needs to put the string into, say, a div.

Hope this helps a bit.

[Davidk]

Re: Viewing weather forecast of each location from a listbox control

You can start to do this all client side now, with the current pre-release of Alpha.

Using the Ajax Callback - Cross Domain, Client-side HTML Templates, and a weather service that supports JSONP, you can make a call directly to the weather service from the Client side and get data back directly.

myweather2 doesn't support this type of call... they use a RESTful call which must come from a server... so... as Steve says... XBasic is the way to go.

http://openweathermap.org/ does support JSONP and this is what I'm using for this demo.

forecast.io is another service that will work with the Ajax Callback - Cross Domain call. I think there are a bunch of others, as well. They all seems to have a free service with APIs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW5I0OaK1Mg

Very interesting stuff.

[DaveF]

Re: Viewing weather forecast of each location from a listbox control

I did not know the client could not make a RESTful service request on another domain. I connect to several RESTful services including wunderground.com using the server-side http_get() method just because it was very easy to implement. I had planned on moving some of these requests to the client-side in order to save an unnecessary trip to the server. I'm glad I came across this thread.

[Davidk]

Re: Viewing weather forecast of each location from a listbox control

You can do it... but it depends on the service... and it's a little tougher.

For Wunderground you can move the call to the client side... and I'm not positive about this... but I don't think you can use the Cross-domain callback.

You have to go a more direct root and use jQuery and process the results (which you'd have to do anyway).

So... for Wunderground... making sure you're jQuery libraries are loaded, noconflict, etc. here is a Javascript function you'd put into a UX component...

function showWeather(){

  jQuery.ajax({
  url : "http://api.wunderground.com/api/yourkey/geolookup/conditions/q/IA/Cedar_Rapids.json",
  dataType : "jsonp",
  success : function(parsed_json) {
  var location = parsed_json['location']['city'];
  var temp_f = parsed_json['current_observation']['temp_f'];
  alert("Current temperature in " + location + " is: " + temp_f);
  }
  });

}

[Davidk]

Re: Viewing weather forecast of each location from a listbox control

Got to amend this. Yes... Wunderground does work with the new Alpha Ajax Callback Cross-Domain action.

Wunderground does things a little different than I've seen at other sites.

Here's an example of a working URL for the Cross-Domain action.

javascript:'http://api.wunderground.com/api/yourkey/conditions/q/CA/San_Francisco.json?callback=getWeatherCallback'

[CharlesParker]

Re: Viewing weather forecast of each location from a listbox control

David nice video - but I can't see the video clearly is that a youtube limitation? Regardless - thanks again for sharing. I wish it was a little bit easier to grasp all of this API stuff. I have a whole list of API's I want to use, etc but at this point I have a better chance of finding a black cat, in a dark room, that is not there.

[Davidk]

Re: Viewing weather forecast of each location from a listbox control

I know what you mean. It's almost easy stuff to grasp once you see it... but then you run into another site's api where the docs stink and you've no idea if it's not working because of the call, because of cross-domain, because the site hasn't set up something or because it simply doesn't work. Wunderground buried it's "callback" info... and it doesn't seem to use request variables in a normal way.

Sometimes the videos "sharpen"... sometimes they don't. Maybe I'll find a different delivery method.