This gem is an internal LVS project for communicating with an AGP (Advanced Gaming Platform) backend server.

In the old days there was the WebApi classes which used XML-RPC. Then there was the ‘new’ ABP::API::JSN class (why JSON is abbreviated to JSN is unknown) which has all the JSON API calls in one class.

This felt very un-Railsy, so Andy Jeffries wrote the new JsonService parent class, so we can treat each group of JSON services like a model. This is similar to the way ActiveResource works (but we can’t use ActiveResource as our models aren’t really resources).

As a simple example of how to create a new model based JSON API class:

require 'json_service'

class Event < LVS::JsonService::Base
  self.site = AGP_LOCATION + '/jsonservices/'
  self.service_prefix = 'com.lvsint.abp.client.json.commands.'
  self.field_prefix = 'event_'
  
  define_service :special, 'DoSomethingSpecial.json', 
    :defaults => {:n => 5}, :required => [:n, :locale]
  
  define_service :details, 'ListAllEvents.json',
    :defaults => {:searchType => Event::SEARCH_TYPE_IDS}, 
    :required => [:searchType, :searchIds],
    :optional => [:locale, :period, :includeEventInfoYN]

end

You then use it just like an ActiveRecord model (at the moment it’s read only – we’ll add write capabilities to it in an ActiveRecord style when we need them):

events = Event.special :locale => "en-gb"
events.each do |event|
  puts "#{event.id} #{event.title}"
end

The field names come from the JSON return field names after the field_prefix is stripped off (if present).

There is also a bit of magic that converts fields ending in ‘date’ to be a Time value, and fields starting with has_ such as has_bets to return a boolean (and create a bets? method too).

The first version of json_service only worked if the result was an array of hashes. The latest version will now accept a hash as the result and make any elements that have arrays as the values an array of objects. For example, given the JSON as follows:

{
  'event_id': 132,
  'event_location': 'Anfield, Liverpool, England',
  'teams': [
    {
      'name': 'Liverpool',
      'colour': 'Red'
    },
    {
      'name': 'Everton',
      'colour': 'Blue'
    }
  ]
}

You could then use the class in this way:

event = Event.my_combined_call :locale => "en-gb"
puts "ID: " + event.id
puts "Location: " + event.location
events.teams.each do |team|
  puts "#{team.name}(#{event.colour})"
end

There are times when you’re ready to develop on the Rails side but the Web API isn’t ready. You can create a fake service that just parses a hard-coded JSON string in the same way as it would if it had come back from the Web API.

class Event < LVS::JsonService::Base
  self.site = AGP_LOCATION + '/jsonservices/'
  self.service_prefix = 'com.lvsint.abp.client.json.commands.'
  self.field_prefix = 'event_'
  
  fake_service :special, '{"status":"OK", "count":2}'
end

The AGP backend doesn’t always reliably allow a connection and prompt response. Therefore there is now the facility to define a timeout for a connection (and response) and an amount of retries rather than immediately failing.

The new parameters are defined as per the following example:

  define_service :last_minute, 'FDJListLastMinuteEventsService.json', 
    :defaults => {:n => 5}, :required => [:n, :locale], :timeout => 3, :retries => 3

The default values are 1 second timeout (note: this is actually 1 second connection timeout and 1 second read timeout, so 2 seconds total) and 0 retries.

If it fails to connect or times out, it retries :retries times with timeout set to :timeout + 50%.

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