Add route lookup via a route API server #232
Conversation
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This allows running a local API server in a docker container and directing the API calls to that. |
So far there are two servers that I'm aware of that offer this API service: api.adsb.lol and adsbdb.com. The api.adsb.lol code is open source and can also be run locally in a container. Either way, that code uses the VirtualRaderServer route data as published on GitHub, adsbdb uses its own, independently maintained data. For use with remote servers like adsbdb.com this commit also adds a rate limiting library and a reference to axios in order to easily and cleanly allow API accesses without exceeding the rate limits of the API provider. Once the app receives a callsign for a flight (and that is different from the registration - as none of the free providers track 'live flight plans'; they all only include information about scheduled flights), it checks if there is already route information for this flight cached and if not it makes an API call to look up the origin and destination of that flight. If the API service is using the second generation API service that works with the VRS data, it also implements a (somewhat simplistic) plausibility check to ensure that obviously questionable route information isn't shown to the user (assuming the user enables passing lat/lng data to the server. The code tries to be very careful not to run afoul of rate limits of route API sites - right now this is hopefully conservative enough that even people running a couple of different tar1090 instances won't get in trouble - but one can create a scenario where power users with many windows open might still end up with too many API requests. The number of requests and the corresponding time slice can be configured. Signed-off-by: Dirk Hohndel <[email protected]>
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quick update on this... Fundamentally, I'm poking around and learning more about a new (to me) infrastructure. And I think the design how I have implemented this right now is fundamentally not right. Thanks to Katia I have a different path I want to go down for a little while to see if that isn't much better in the larger context. |
So far there are two servers that I'm aware of that offer this API service: api.adsb.lol and adsbdb.com.
The api.adsb.lol code is open source and can also be run locally in a container. Either way, that code uses the VirtualRaderServer route data as published on GitHub, adsbdb uses its own, independently maintained data.
For use with remote servers like adsbdb.com this commit also adds a rate limiting library and a reference to axios in order to easily and cleanly allow API accesses without exceeding the rate limits of the API provider.
Once the app receives a callsign for a flight (and that is different from the registration - as none of the free providers track 'live flight plans'; they all only include information about scheduled flights), it checks if there is already route information for this flight cached and if not it makes an API call to look up the origin and destination of that flight.
If the API service is using the second generation API service that works with the VRS data, it also implements a (somewhat simplistic) plausibility check to ensure that obviously questionable route information isn't shown to the user (assuming the user enables passing lat/lng data to the server.
The code tries to be very careful not to run afoul of rate limits of route API sites - right now this is hopefully conservative enough that even people running a couple of different tar1090 instances won't get in trouble - but one can create a scenario where power users with many windows open might still end up with too many API requests. The number of requests and the corresponding time slice can be configured.