Thank you for joining me for this video, the HTTP plugin. For Servoy University, I'm Bob Kuesick. The HTTP plugin allows you to go and directly download web pages right into your solution. You can also download media data, so that includes images, PDFs, anything else that you can get a URL to. You can download and put into your database. You can even go ahead and fill out web forms as if you were sitting in front of the web form and filling it out and hitting the Submit button, but you can do it programmatically using the HTTP plugin. Let's have a look at it. Let's have a look at a few of the functions. The first two, create HTTP client. It creates a named HTTP client. This allows you to have multiple clients open at the same time and have them accessing different URLs. Once you create an HTTP client, you can go ahead and reuse it throughout the whole session. Deleting it does just what it says. Getting a particular cookie or getting all of the cookies that are in that HTTP client session, you can do that programmatically as well. You can get the character set of the last page visited and you can do things like get the media data, get the page data, and get a poster and a poster as we'll see in a minute. That's the thing that allows you to virtually fill out web forms programmatically. You can also use the put command to directly put a file from your hard drive up to a website. If you need to use proxies, you can go ahead and use that and you can also set the HTTP client cookie yourself to a certain cookie value. If you do use cookies, then you have the cookie object available to you. You can get comment, you can get the domain, name, the path, whether it's secure and get the value of the cookie. Likewise in just a minute, when we take a look at creating a poster, then you get a poster event and you can add a file, add a header, add a parameter, do the post, get the resulting page data, and set the character set. When I get started, I've created a very simple solution here that will go and get the page data of a specified URL. We'll also get an image data and then it will post to my Tumblr account. Let's see how it looks in the Smart Client. All right, here I'm just going to go ahead and get the clickword.com page so we can see what it's supposed to look like. Let's jump over to the browser. Here's how the page looks when you view it in a browser. Let's see how it looks when we go and get that same data and display it in a Smart Client. We'll say get page and here it's downloaded the source of the page and here it's showing a preview of what the page looks like in just a straight HTML area. This is the same data. This is a text area and this is an HTML area. As you can see, it's less than optimal. The HTML renderer that is in Java is really antiquated and not so great. In fact, it's downright cruddy. If you're doing anything that's at all advanced, a better option would be to go to servoy stuff and I have it open here. Let me show you that. Go to servoy- hyphenstuff.com and they have a browser suite and this is actually a full browser suite. It's a beam that you can actually put into your solution. It's rather large because it uses a lot of Java libraries but if you really want to have a browser within your servoy Smart Client solution, this is really the only way to go. All right, let's jump back to our example. I have the source of the actual document itself in this scrolling text field and I have the rendered HTML on this side. Let's scroll down in here and let's go and find the logo. Here's the top logo. I'm going to just copy this and I'll paste it into this image URL and I can say get image. Now what's been voiced on is actually gone out and grabbed and downloaded from the internet. This is an actual media field itself so I can load it, save it, do anything that I want to and this is simply a label that's rendered with the same source. You can get any image that you want. Let's come over here back to the browser for a moment and let's take a look at my Tumblr page. So here's my Tumblr page. There are no current posts on there and so what I wanted to do is I wanted to create a servoy Smart Client way to post things into this Tumblr account programmatically. To do that, I found that there's an API for Tumblr and here it tells you exactly what you you need to do in your HTTP post request and which URL to use, which parameters and which are optional and which are not and all of those kinds of things. So I had to look at this and then I built some code in servoy to post this. All right, so here I have my Tumblr user and password and I'm going to say this is posted from servoy and the message is created. By servoy Smart Client and I'm going to press the post button and the result that came back is a number and this is the number of the actual posting. So if I come to the web page now and I simply reload it, you can see that we have a new posted from servoy created by servoy Smart Client and this is marked as a private post. That's one of the options in the Tumblr API. All right, let's go back to servoy developer and take a look at the code behind all of those functions. And so the very first button that just goes and gets the clickware homepage simply uses the plugin HTTP get page data and get page data. We see it takes a URL and you can optionally pass it a HTTP client name if you've already created one and then also a array that contains a username and password if you need to authenticate to show the page that you want to get down. The button that I press to go and get the clickware logo, use the call get media data and it's very similar to get page data and then it takes a URL and an optional HTTP client name. You can get any kind of binary data including zip files, PDFs, images, basically anything that you have a URL for, you can bring down and put into your database. For that Tumblr example where I actually posted a form, we use the function called get poster and it takes a URL and an optional HTTP client name. So in line 79, var poster equals plugins get poster and then this is the URL of the Tumblr API. Once you get that poster object, then there are other functions. You can add a file, add a header, add a parameter, etc. So what I'm doing is I'm adding parameters, they're named parameters according to the Tumblr API. Just to refresh our memory, let's go back over the browser for a minute. We'll have a look at the API. So here we have email, password, the posting type and then there's optional parameters. One is private and one is the state for published drafts, submission, etc. And then down here are the different post types. So I just did a regular post but you can also post photos, quotes, conversations, videos, audio, all of those kinds of things and it will work directly out of your servoy solution. So let's pop back over to our code. So here I've used the add parameter function to add my named parameters coming from data. In this case, they're all form variables but they can come from normal fields in your database, they can come from related fields. So I've set the email, the password, the type, the title, the body. I've set private to one and there's also another command called send a Twitter and I've set that to know. And then down here on line 87, I've set a variable called HTTP code and I've told the poster, all right, go ahead and post it. Now different APIs will go ahead and deliver different things as a result. Some will just give an HTTP code of 200 which means that, okay, everything is fine. Some will give you an error, some will give you like in this case, the actual ID of the article. So this is going to change for each and every API that you're going to go ahead and access. The other thing that you need to be aware of if you're going to be posting these forms from time to time, the site may change their API. What was if you're using get page data and you're getting the result of a web page and you're parsing it and maybe pulling out pieces of information, be aware that those page designs can also change which will also affect your code. By using the HTTP plugin, you can create powerful solutions that interact with web data with data from your own database. Thanks for watching.