Pass the SOAP?

[Dave_D]

Hi all,

I'm writing a personal app that better tracks changes to radio systems I'm interested in. In essence, it will checksum each of the frequencies in a system and then detect changes in that checksum weeks, months or years later - whenever I decide to synchronize. This will preclude the necessity to login to RR every seven days in order to keep up with changes. And, unlike the scanner control apps out there, it will highlight changes and allow me to synchronize granularly, without applying sweeping overwrites and without losing my tweaks.

To do this most efficiently, I'm guessing RR's SOAP interface is the way to go. Where can I find more information on it? Is it open to the public? To premium members? Is there a better way to do this? I'd prefer not to write my own app.

Thank you!

Dave

[cpuerror]

Dave I have written some software using the SOAP interface so I can offer a bit of insight.

You can skip the checksum checking. Every system has a "Last Updated" field that you can check instead. The new SOAP interface is the way to go, the old web api is going offline at the end of July. It is open to anyone, all you have to do is click on "Account", then API, then click on Apply For App Key. Theres no extra cost to it but you have to be a premium subscriber to use the interface.

You should check the wiki SOAP page for more information. There is the WSDL which well tell you how to interface with the service. I don't think there is a way around this without writing your own app. I would suggest you download the free version of VB. Net (2003) from Microsoft. Then get the WSDL compiler, which can download the wsdl straight from this site and generate the code for you to interface with the service.

If you want this to syncronize with your scanner, you will ofcourse need to write code to upload to the scanner as well. Since you want granular control, your app with need to download from the scanner first, or have provisions for user editing of saved files. If you have never written SOAP code or scanner interface code then you will have a great learning experience as well but if could be a lot of fun. Best of luck.

[Dave_D]

Thank you for the quick reply! That's good news. I'll check those out right away.

I'll be doing this with ColdFusion and MS SQL Server 2000, to stay in my comfort zone. On the plus side, this means my app will be web-accessible for point-edits on the road. On the downside, syncing with the scanner will take a low-fi approach - write CSV files in the format used by UASD, copy and paste to the UASD folder and sync.

The other thing I'm looking forward to playing with is locations. I've setup a table with multi-point locations. For example, a large county might be described in three 50-mile circles. When I export from the database, I'll get the number of duplicate system programs appropriate for the selected location.

And, it'll be nice to change alarms, lockouts, quick keys, tags, etc., en masse by way of queries, rather than plodding along line by line.

We'll see how far I get....

Thanks again!

[ka3jjz]

Dave here are 2 articles from our wiki that I think may help - I'm not up on all of this SOAP stuff, but hopefully you can use it...

RadioReference.com Web Service3.1 - The RadioReference Wiki

API - The RadioReference Wiki

73 Mike

[Dave_D]

Awesome! Thank you!!!