LifeFX

Live fx using Python November 12, 2008

Following Ori’s post on how to get started on using Live fx with IronPython, I feel encouraged and somewhat obligated to write up a post on how to do the same with no Fe.

Here is the basic function in Python which returns the data in a dictionary given the URL -

import urllib2
import urllib
import json
def getData(uri):
   authStr = '<insert your auth token here>';
   # create the request
   req = urllib2.Request(uri)
   # add the headers
   req.add_header('Accept', 'application/json')
   req.add_header('Authorization', authStr)
   response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
   data = response.read()
   # convert the string to a dictionary and return it
   return json.JSONDecoder().decode(data);

If I save the above function in a file called livefx.py, then I can play with it as follows -

As you can see that we can get the service document by getting the data from the cloud endpoint in the form of a dictionary. Printing the dictionary gives us the following -

1. Base Uri – base URI for the cloud endpoint
2. Contacts Link – relative URI for navigating to user’s Windows Live Contacts
3. Profiles – relative URI for navigating to user’s Windows Live Profiles
4. Mesh – relative URI for navigating to user’s Mesh

Now, if I have to access user’s contacts, I can do that as follows -

Similarly, if I have to list all the user’s mesh objects, I can do the following -

I hope you would have gotten the idea by now on how to work with other resources. You might ask how to get hold of the auth token? Well, there are a more than a couple ways in which you can access it.

1. Access it via .NET SDK for Live Framework
2. Look at the request header in Livefx Resource Browser
3. Look at the request header when you are sending request to http://developer.mesh-ctp.com on Fiddler.

Ofcourse, when you are building a production web application, you will replace this header with that used for delegated authentication and use the delegated authentication token.