Delicious Trailmaker Tutorial

In our first class on August 31, we did an in-class demo showing one possible way to implement trails from Vannevar Bush’s Memex using the Delicious API. This tutorial reviews the steps from class. At the end of this tutorial, you will have constructed a small web application that saves a collection of bookmarks to Delicious as a trail. A trail is identified by a set of special tags: trail:[name_of_trail] and step:[step_number].

Getting Started

0. Before getting started, you may want to create a separate Delicious account for experimenting. The Delicious API has no undo, and you don’t want a mistake to erase any existing bookmarks. Also, unless you use a properly configured proxy server, your password will be sent in the clear. You may want to change your password to something that isn’t used by another of your other accounts.

1. Start with a basic HTML page that includes Google-hosted copies of jQuery and jQuery UI. You can download this template at http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290-iol/f10/resources/html_skeleton.html

The code samples in this tutorial are broken up by explanations. For the uninterrupted code, you can download the completed Trailmaker at http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290-iol/f10/resources/delicious_trailmaker.html

2. Create the basic structure that you will need in HTML. This includes a <form> to specify a username, a <div> and <ul> to display loaded bookmarks, and a <div> and a <ul> to create a new trail. The following structure is a good start:

<form id="load-bookmarks" method="get">
<h2 id="enter_a_delicious_username">Enter a Delicious username:</h2>
    <input type="text" name="username" id="username" value="" />
    <input type="submit" value="Get Bookmarks" />
</form>

<div id="bookmarks">
<h2 id="bookmarks">Bookmarks</h2>
    <ul></ul>
</div>

<div id="new-trail">
<h2 id="new_trail">New Trail</h2>
    <ul></ul>
    <form id="save-trail" method="post">
        Username: <input id="save-username" type="text" name="save-username" /><br />
        Password: <input id="save-password" type="password" name="save-password" /><br />
        <input type="button" name="make-trail" value="Make New Trail" id="make-trail" />                
    </form>
</div>

Loading Bookmarks

3. When a user enters an account in the #load-bookmarks form, we want to load the Delicious bookmarks for that account. Delicious provides a feeds API that lets us get the bookmarks for a user at http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/{username}.

First, we create a global object called “delicious” to store settings. Then we want to attach the JavaScript for this document once the page is “ready,” so we use $(document).ready() inside a <script> tag in the document <head>. You put an anonymous callback function inside .ready() which executes once the page is in memory:

<script>
// Create an empty global object where we can store settings for connecting to Delicious
var delicious = {};

$(document).ready(function() {
    // What you want to happen when the page loads
});
</script>

In this ready function, we’ll attach a function to the submit event of the #load-bookmarks form. When the form is submitted (by pressing the return key or by clicking on the “Get Bookmarks” button), this function will run. The last thing this function does should be return false;. The browser’s default behavior when submitting a form is to load a new page, and we use return false to prevent this action.

$('#load-bookmarks').submit(function(){
    // What you want to happen when the load bookmarks form is submitted
    return false;
});

CSS selectors are the basis for nearly all of the jQuery Javascript library. Most programming occurs by selecting some group of elements on the current page and manipulating them. Because the form has the id attribute set to ‘load-bookmarks’, we can select this element using #load-bookmarks—the pound sign (#) is used to indicate an id in CSS. Then we attach a function to the submit() event of the form. jQuery can attach functions (which is called “binding”) to many kinds of events, which are described in the jQuery documentation.

The functions that we use on inside .ready() and .submit() do not have a name—they are “anonymous functions,” which are a feature of Javascript and very common. They allow you to define commands that you want to happen inline, without defining a function somewhere else in your code. We’ll discuss anonymous functions more in lecture two; You can also read this guide to anonymous functions in JavaScript.

4. When the form is submitted, we want to get the value of the account name entered in the form, which we do with var username = $('#username').val(); Although Javascript does not require var in variable declarations, you should always use it. Then we use the getJSON() method to get the bookmarks from Delicious. You can provide a function to getJSON that is called when the request is complete. In fact, if you want anything to happen when the request is returned, you have to provide a function to getJSON because of the asynchronous nature of AJAX requests. This function receives the response from the server, which you can use to construct an HTML list item and add it to the list of bookmarks.

var username = $('#username').val();
// This cross-domain request requires that you use '?callback=?' because it is done using JSONP
$.getJSON('http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/' + username + '?callback=?',
function(json){
    // json contains the response provided by the server
    // You can use console.log(json) to examine the response
   $(json).each(function(index) {
       // this.u // url
       // this.d // description
       // this.n // extended notes
       // this.t // array of tags

        // Create an HTML string for the bookmark
        // We also use the .data method to store the notes and tags
        // of the bookmark in the DOM with the object
        // Finally, we add it to the list of bookmarks with appendTo()
       $('<li></li>').html('<a href="' + this.u + '">' + this.d + '</a>')
        .data('extended', this.n)
        .data('tags', this.t)
        .appendTo('#bookmarks ul');
   });

   // Later, you'll add dragging functionality here

});
return false;    

Now entering a Delicious user’s account name and clicking “Load Bookmarks” works.

Creating a new trail

5.We want to let users drag loaded bookmarks to the New Trail box and rearrange them before saving the trail. Before we do this, we should make the #bookmarks box and the #new-trail box actually appear side-by-side. Add these lines to between the <style></style> tags in your document head. This makes each box roughly half the width of the screen, and the float: left makes them appear side-by-side:

#bookmarks, #new-trail {
    float: left;
    width: 48%;
    margin-right: 1%;
    min-height: 300px;
    border: 1px solid #666;
}

6. The jQuery UI library makes it easy to script complex actions like dragging and dropping. First, we want to make each of the loaded bookmarks draggable. We can do this with the .draggable() method when we load each bookmark. Add the following line at the end of your getJSON callback function:

$('#bookmarks li').draggable({revert: true});

7. Now we need a place to drop these draggable elements. We’ll make the entire #new-trail box a droppable area, and define a function that copies the bookmark to the list when the user drags a loaded bookmark to the area. Notice that the droppable method only takes one argument, a Javascript object (indicated by the curly braces {}) that provides various parameters by name. This is common practice in jQuery and jQuery UI. Here we are providing the accept and drop parameters.

$('#new-trail').droppable({
    accept: 'li', // This droppable area accepts li elements
    drop: function(event, ui) {
        // Don't confuse ul, the <ul> unordered-list with ui, the user interface element
        // .draggable('disable') says that we want to remove the draggable behavior
        $(ui.draggable).draggable('disable').appendTo('#new-trail ul');
    }
});    

We also want to make the list of bookmarks in the new trail list sortable, to allow a user to re-arrange the order of the points in the trail. To do this we can use the .sortable() function. Insert this line in your document .ready() function. Simple, right?

$('#new-trail ul').sortable();    

Saving the trail

8. Finally, we want to send each bookmark in this newly created trail to a specified user account when it is saved. We start by attaching a function to the submit of the #save-trail form. Remember to return false at the end of the function!

$('#save-trail').submit(function() {
    // Let's ask the user for a name for the trail
    // We are storing the name that the user enters as the text of the
    // h2 in the #new-trail div
    // The || syntax here lets us specify a default value
    $('#new-trail h2').text(prompt('Enter a name for your trail:') || 'My New Trail');

    // Store the username and password to send with each request
    // This isn't the best security practice, but we do it here
    // in the interest of brevity
    delicious.username = $('#save-username').val();
    delicious.password = $('#save-password').val();
    delicious.stepNum = 0;

    saveTrail();
    return false;
});    

In the saveTrail() function we want to gather the information for a single bookmark and post it to Delicious. We have to do this one list item at a time because the Delicious API only provides a call to save a single bookmark. When we have successfully saved one bookmark, we move on to the next one. When they are all done, we let the user know that saving was successful.

In order to update a bookmarks on Delicious, you need to re-save all the information from the old bookmark (including URL, description, notes, and tags) with your changes. Fortunately, we stored all this information using jQuery’s .data() method when we initially loaded the bookmarks. .data() lets you store any information you want in the DOM with an element.

function saveTrail () {
    // We need to keep track of which bookmark number we are saving, so we
    // can use the `step:2` syntax that we have established
    // When the user submitted the form we started with stepNum = 0,
    // so we can increment it each time we call saveTrail
    delicious.stepNum++;

    // Change spaces in the trail name to underscores to follow our trail syntax
    // By default, the .replace() method doesn't replace ALL the occurrances
    // of a string, so we are using the global flag in our regular expression
    // to replace everything. The global flag is set with the "g" after
    // the regular expression (/ /g)
    var newTrailName = 'trail:' + $('#new-trail h2').text().toLowerCase().replace(/ /g, '_');

    // Get the first bookmark to save, which is the first element of the #new-trail list
    var bookmark = $('#new-trail li:first');

    // Assemble the data to send to Delicious
    var postData = {
        url: bookmark.find('a').attr('href'),
        description: bookmark.find('a').html(),
        extended: bookmark.data('extended'),
        tags: bookmark.data('tags').join(' ') + ' ' + newTrailName + ' ' + 'step:' + delicious.stepNum,
        method: 'posts/add',
        username: delicious.username,
        password: delicious.password
    };

Here we have constructed postData, which is a Javascript objet with keys and values for the data we are going to send to the server. The first four values are for Delicious: the url we are saving, its description (which is the title, in Delicious parlance), the extended notes for the bookmark, and the tags. Note the most important part is occurring on the line with the tags assignment: we are getting the existing tags and adding the new trail name, as well as the step number.

We stored the first line of the #new-trail list in bookmark so we could use it repeatedly. The .find() method lets us search for some potion of the document within the current selection. So .find('a').attr('href') finds the link tag within the bookmark and gets the href attribute for it.

We are also sending the method of the Delicious API that we are calling and the user’s Delicious username and password.

Next, we use jQuery’s $.post method to send the data to Delicious. You are welcome to use this code as is without inspecting it closely.

// Send the data to Delicious through a proxy and handle the response
// Use $.post if the script is located on the same server
// Otherwise, use $.get to avoid cross-domain problems
//$.post('delicious_proxy.php',
// If you are running this on your own machine, you may need to swap the $.post line for this $.getJSON line
$.getJSON('http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290-iol/f10/resources/delicious_proxy.php?callback=?',
  postData,
 function(rsp){
        if (rsp.result_code === "access denied") {
            alert('The provided Delicious username and password are incorrect.');
        } else if (rsp.result_code === "something went wrong") {
            alert('There was an unspecified error communicating with Delicious.');
        } else if (rsp.result_code === "done") {
            // Bookmark was saved properly
            $('#new-trail li:first').remove(); // Remove the bookmark we just saved
            if ($('#new-trail li').length > 0) {
                // If there are any bookmarks left to save
                // Save the next bookmark in the trail in 1000ms (1 second)
                // We have to wait this period of time to comply with the
                // terms of the Delicious API. If we don't we may have access denied.
                setTimeout(saveTrail, 1000);
            } else {
                // We're done saving the trail
                delicious.password = null; // Don't store the user's password any longer than we need to
                alert ("Your trail has been saved!");
            }
        }
    });
}

You’re done with the basic tutorial! If you have any questions, ask ryan@ischool or npdoty@ischool via email, or bring them to lecture two.

Improvements

We can also add some extra niceties, like making sure links open in a new window so a person doesn’t lose his or her work in creating a new trail. Adding this code to the ready function makes all links open in a new window.

$('a').live('click', function() {
    window.open($(this).attr('href'));
    return false;
});    

You might want to provide some feedback while the trail is being saved. Since each bookmark has to be saved with a delay of 1 second, saving a trail could take a long time, and the user should know that something is happening.

You might disable the “Save Trail” button when the form is submitted using jQuery’s .attr() method

Also, our JavaScript does not check if a user actually entered a name for his or her trail, nor if the user entered a username or password. You could implement a check to make sure these values have been entered before saving the trail.

Additional Information

The Delicious API has a variety of methods available. To update an existing bookmark, use the posts/add method and include the replace=no parameter.

If you are going to be using the Delicious API via JavaScript you should change your password to something different from your other online accounts. Because of browsers limitations to prevent cross-site scripting, you have to send your password as a URL GET request. Although this connection happens via https, your password would appear in log files. If you’re interested in why this has to be the case, ask us. Alternately, you can download the PHP proxy script yourself, run it in your own web space (change the .txt extension to .php), and POST securely to it.


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