Category Archives: Programming

Database design and discussion – Part II

In the previous post database design, we discussed what our database will look like. But that was just half of the database design discussion as we still have to cover the heart and soul of our SocialPie service. In this post, we will cover the other half and that is the APIs we will use from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Using Instagram APIs

So Instagram which is now part of Facebook offers a marketing API for businesses. You can find more detail on the Instagram API. This API is built on Facebook’s Graph API. An interesting thing to look at this API, we will find what kind of data we are actually looking to get and store in our database.

This API offers something called Insights API, it provides us the data for user metrics for business accounts and stories metrics. Considering Instagram API is linked with Facebook, we will be using the same API for Facebook data.

/media/insights/ –  This API gives us details about engagements, impressions, and reach about stories. A sample response looks like below:

{
  "data": [
    {
      "name": "impressions",
      "period": "lifetime",
      "values": [
        {
          "value": 264
        }
      ],
      "title": "Impressions",
      "description": "Total number of times the media object has been seen",
      "id": "17855590849148465/insights/impressions/lifetime"
    },
    {
      "name": "reach",
      "period": "lifetime",
      "values": [
        {
          "value": 103
        }
      ],
      "title": "Reach",
      "description": "Total number of unique accounts that have seen the media object",
      "id": "17855590849148465/insights/reach/lifetime"
    }
  ]
}

/user/insights/ – This API gives us different metrics data for business accounts. These metrics include impressions, follower counts, website clicks, text message clicks, profile views, online followers. A sample response looks like below:

{
  "data": [
    {
      "name": "impressions",
      "period": "day",
      "values": [
        {
          "value": 4,
          "end_time": "2017-05-04T07:00:00+0000"
        },
        {
          "value": 66,
          "end_time": "2017-05-05T07:00:00+0000"
        }
      ],
      "title": "Impressions",
      "description": "Total number of times this profile has been seen",
      "id": "17841400008460056/insights/impressions/day"
    },
    {
      "name": "reach",
      "period": "day",
      "values": [
        {
          "value": 3,
          "end_time": "2017-05-04T07:00:00+0000"
        },
        {
          "value": 36,
          "end_time": "2017-05-05T07:00:00+0000"
        }
      ],
      "title": "Reach",
      "description": "Total number of unique accounts that have seen this profile",
      "id": "17841400008460056/insights/reach/day"
    },
    {
      "name": "profile_views",
      "period": "day",
      "values": [
        {
          "value": 0,
          "end_time": "2017-05-04T07:00:00+0000"
        },
        {
          "value": 2,
          "end_time": "2017-05-05T07:00:00+0000"
        }
      ],
      "title": "Profile Views",
      "description": "Total number of unique accounts that have viewed this profile within the specified period",
      "id": "17841400008460056/insights/profile_views/day"
    }
  ]
}

What fields we will use and build our database?

So what data from this API we will be using to build our database. We will have a table called InstagramData This table will include the following fields

  • impressions
  • reach
  • profile_views
  • followers
  • audience_gender_age
  • email_contacts
  • video_views

Therefore, we showed how we will be using Facebook and Instagram APIs. In the next post, we will look into Twitter API. Currently, Twitter does offer an enterprise API at a premium price. But if there is no open-source API for developers, we will not be using it in this project.

References

  1. Instagram API documentation – Instagram API

 

500 Miles

This is a non-programming blog post. I just wanted to announce the publication of my first fiction book 500 Miles.

500 Miles

The book contains 14 short stories about characters from train traveling. I wrote more about the book on my other blog 500 Miles at yogsma.

You can buy this book on Amazon India, Flipkart or Pothi.com. The links for the same are as below:

500 Miles at Amazon India

500 Miles at Flipkart

500 Miles at Pothi.com

 

Database design and discussion – Part I

Continuing the series of building a spring-based web application, in this post, we will discuss database design. Based on this database, we will eventually build our REST APIs.

Database Design

We will build database design as we go about discussing the APIs that we will be using from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Since we will have users of a company logging into our application, few basic database tables that we will need

  1. User
  2. Company
  3. Role
  4. UserPassword
  5. Address

Database Model Part 1

An administrator user can add their company and can also add users. An administrator will be allowed to create reports and she can share these reports with other users. These other users will have the role of reporters.

These tables will be the foundation blocks for our application. As referred to user flow, a user with a particular role will log in to the application. He can view/change the social performance data for his company and propose new marketing strategies. Of course, this is not the complete database model for the application. We still have to look into what data we will be fetching from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram APIs. We will study those APIs in the next post.

Follow the progress of this application here.

Architecture of the web application

In my last post design, I discussed the idea that we are going to work on building a web application. I detailed the user flow, but I missed out on some points about security and session management. I will add the details of architecture of social KPI web application.

Name of the application

Before we discuss the application, we still haven’t decided on the name for the application. This web application will indicate the performance of a small business in social media. Basically, this is a free tool for marketing and depending on how small businesses use social media, they will be able to build a campaign for their business. If small businesses are not using social media, they are already at a disadvantage. This is just a pie in the big social world. That brings me to the purpose of the application to provide social key performance indicators (social KPIs) to businesses. So the name of the application will be SocialPie.

Security and Session Management

We will use Spring Boot. We will be using spring security elements to build authentication and authorization aspect of the application. I will definitely include the details of this component when we will start working on building the application. In a previous post spring security, I have discussed how to use spring security for authentication.

For managing a session, we will be using spring provided service based on Redis. We will also be using caching considering we will be connecting to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram APIs, so we can keep the data in cache for pre-decided time. This will be beneficial from a performance perspective. We will be using Redis caching with our own cache manager to handle caching.

I will try to include all these elements in the architecture diagram that we will be building in this post.

Architecture

Architecture of web application Social KPI

 

Conclusion

In this post, we created an architecture for our web application Social KPI. In the next post, I will detail another user flow with some class diagrams and explain each service in detail. The application will be based on microservice architecture.

 

Design and discussion of an idea for Saas Application

In this post of building an application, we discussed what is a saas application and how it can be designed and built. There are possibly a few ideas that I had in my mind or that I came across on the internet. So, I will discuss an idea for the saas application here.

One of the ideas that I have chosen, is to build a web application for small businesses so they can monitor their social media progress. A report that can give details about how the business is performing. From the outside, the whole idea seems very simple – build a report. But there are a lot of complexities involved here if we will be connecting to multiple social media.

We will be discussing the design of this idea and see if we can make progress to build a final design.

Discussion of the idea for the saas application –

  1. A small business can subscribe to this application on two models. One model will be free and others will be paid.
  2. The free model will offer a basic report about the business’ performance in social media.
  3. The paid model will offer a detailed report along with an action plan to improve marketing ratings.
  4. Part of this architecture and development, first we will build a free model only. Depending on how long it is going to take me to build the entire product, we will plan the paid model.
  5. We will use Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as the three main social media to connect to. All these three social services offer their APIs for developers.

A User flow

  1. If a small business is looking for a marketing tool as part of its social media strategy, they can subscribe to the application that I will be building herewith.
  2. A sign-up page. A user coming across this web application will have to sign up for an account to use the tool.
  3. Sign up will be unique for a business. At least for an alpha version of this tool, only a single user from a business can sign up/login. Maybe next versions or paid versions will give more flexibility to sign up or log in for multiple users from the same business.
    1. A sign-up page will ask for a business name, person’s name, contact number, email address.
    2. A person who is signing up will receive an email for confirmation with login details.
    3. Alpha version will have basic security to login and logout.
  4. Once the business has signed up, that person will access the web application to login.
  5. Alpha version will not deal with security policies at least.
  6. A user once logged into the application will see a dashboard to access the reports.
  7. There will be three reports available for the free subscription model and all three reports will give details about how a business is performing on social media. These three reports will correspond to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
  8. There will be a logout button available for the user to logout. Logout will clear all the session cookies.
  9. Each report will fetch the live data from the respective social media services. Depending on the restrictions for APIs provided by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, fetching of new data will be developed.
  10. The report will also show a graphical representation of performance.

How will this help?

What’s the value of this application for small businesses? Of course, this is the basic question. I had to think about the answer if I had to design this application. That is going to be a unique selling point (USP) of this app.

  1. The tool will provide fact-based data about how the business is doing.
  2. It will provide strategies to improve social media presence.
  3. In turn, this will give an idea to small businesses to market themselves and improve customer satisfaction.

Technology Stack

we will be using Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, Github, and AngularJS.

References

The idea for this saas application was borrowed from here.