learn-co-students/ruby-getting-remote-data-lab-chicago-web-033020

Getting Remote Data Lab

Learning Goals

• Practice sending GET requests using Ruby
• Build a reusable class for sending requests and handling responses

Introduction

It is time to practice building out your own class for retrieving remote data. In this lab, you are tasked with building a generic GetRequester class. This class will be able to take in a URL on initialization and send an HTTP GET request on command. You will also need to build a method for dealing with requests that return JSON.

When complete, you will have a simple, but versatile class for getting information from all kinds of sources over the internet.

Instructions

All work should be completed in lib/get_requester.rb. Use the previous code-along on getting data from APIs as a reference when building out your class.

Start by creating a GetRequester class. This class should be able to initialize with a string URL.

The GetRequester class should have a get_response_body method that sends a GET request to the URL passed in on initialization. This method should return the body of the response.

The GetRequester class should have a parse_json method should use get_response_body to send a request, then return a Ruby Array or Hash made up of data converted from the response of that request.

The tests in this lab will use your code to send a request for some JSON data, located at https://learn-co-curriculum.github.io/json-site-example/endpoints/people.json. Read the test error messages for additional as you work for additional information. Don't forget to require the necessary Ruby modules and classes!

Conclusion

Once you've successfully passed the tests, from this lesson's directory, you should be able to open IRB, use require_relative to load lib/get_requester.rb, and send out some requests!

get_requester = GetRequester.new('https://learn-co-curriculum.github.io/json-site-example/endpoints/people.json')
get_requester.parse_json
#=> [{"name"=>"Daniel", "occupation"=>"LG Fridge Salesman"}, {"name"=>"Joe", "occupation"=>"WiFi Fixer"}, {"name"=>"Avi", "occupation"=>"DJ"}, {"name"=>"Howard", "occupation"=>"Mountain Legend"}]

This class won't work for all cases but is a good starting place to get us off the ground. We can now augment our applications with data from the internet! Combined with our knowledge of Ruby, we have all the tools we need to start building smarter Ruby applications populated with real data.