Understanding GetUsers and GetTeams
It's likely you'll want to grab a list of either Users (Contributors) or Teams but let's be honest, who wants the stock list? Lets play. First up. If you're querying the GetUsers methods, if you want to limit the result to a specific team, pass a team number less than 0. This also applied to searching.
Ordering
Depending on the result set you're querying, you can apply the following constraints: - alias - Order by contributor name.
- rollingDay - Order by points received over the last twenty-four hours.
- rollingWeek - Same as above, over 168 hours.
- rankLastMonth - Order by the rank the subject held last month.
- rankLastWeek - Same as above, over 1 week.
- wus - Order by Work Units.
- numUsers* - Order by the number of contributors in a team.
- lastUpdate - Order by the number of points since last update.
- activeUsers* - Order by the number of active users.
- points - Order by points. This is default and does not have to be specified.
Constraints marked with * only apply to GetTeams. OrientationThere are two seperate modes you may pass over, asc[ending] or desc[ending]. If you query by points and would like the largest result first, apply "desc".
|
What you need to know
Protocol
First up, the above service is based on SOAP. That means they are client-agnostic, you can consume this service however you wish - Java, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, ASP, Ruby (you get the idea). There's quite a few guides on the web detailing web-services, if you're testing the water with our servies I'd suggest Google be your first port-of-call.
Caching
Yup, it sucks, we're caching. At the moment the statistics are hosted on a shared database environment and that means we're running a lot slower than I'd like. We can mitigate some of these issues using caching throughout our architecture which means in some cases the data you pull maybe out of date.
Limitations
At the time of writing we're happy for developers to do consume our content in a non-competitive, non-destructive manor. So by all means, write nifty unix scripts, cool signatures or web-site widgets but don't use our database to power a competing website (if you've got any suggestions, drop us a line).
Avoid scraping the service unnecessarily. Many of the queries which are run against our database are very complex and scan tables which are many gigs in size. If you have any special requirements let us know.
|
Getting started: URLs
Before we can get started, you're going to need some urls! You can access our main presentation facade at the following URL:
|
