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# Making use of the external APIs in 360 People #

## Introduction to the interfaces ##

The external APIs are provided by the 360 People engines as a way for developers
to interface with the engines and their capabilities from external services.

The APIs are provided in two forms: 

 * A ContentProvider which provides unfetted access to all the data stored by
 the internal database
 * An AIDL service which allows external services to send commands and request
 data which is unavailable via the ContentProvider interface.
 
Between these two interfaces, we've tried to expose as much of the internal
functionality as possible. Use cases for these APIs already include:

 * Novel presentation of "Activities" data such as status updates from social
 networks.
 * New chat client functionality.
 
## Using the APIs ##

Before you start trying to get this working yourself you should probably take a
quick look through the official documentation for both ContentProviders and
AIDL remote services ([here](http://is.gd/foQp2) [and here](http://is.gd/foQrI) respectively).

After that, there are a few things to note, and then you should plough straight
into the code:

 * The main interface (referred to in the sample code here as mPeopleService -
 which is of type IDatabaseSubscriptionService) tries its best to stick to
 implementing com.vodafone360.people.service.interfaces.IPeopleService, with
 the addition of a few helper methods to make our lives easier. See official
 documentation for how to use this, or if you have access look through the
 UI code for more complex examples of what you can do.
 * The ContentProvider works just like most standard ContentProviders in
 the Android system. You should note, though, that the "path" part of the
 querying URI tells it which *table* you would like to query against in the
 database. Again, check the official documentation for information on which
 tables are available to you, or look in the package
 com.vodafone360.people.database.tables . In the current implementation, you
 are allowed *read access only* to *all* tables within the database.
 * For a more complex example of how you can make use of these APIs, check
 the implementation of Chat functionality using embedded webviews in the
 project at [email protected]:FlashApk.git . Note: this is not a
 stock documentation project, and there are no guarantees as to the quality
 of the code or comments!


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