iSENSE Racket

iSENSE Racket is a wrapper around the iSENSE website API written in Racket. It also includes a library of various utility functions useful when working with intent-related things.

Below is a brief explanation of the content of these two files, and what they do. For a more detailed explanation, look at the inline documentation. Also, the code is fairly self-explanatory. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

There's probably still a couple bugs, most of which are probably related to handling errors resulting from not having the correct permissions to upload data to a project. In the mean time, don't do that. Alternatively, you could do that and try to recover from the errors. Both work with varying degrees of success.

Using iSENSE Racket

1. Download or clone this repository.
2. Copy the files isense-3.rkt and quick-net.rkt into the same directory as the file that is going to call them.
3. Call (require "isense-3.rkt") at the top of every file calling iSENSE Racket-related functionality.

isense-3.rkt Documentation

• isense-url: Which version of iSENSE to use - isenseproject.org is the production website, while rsense-dev.cs.uml.edu is for development.
  Currently, the only way to change which version of iSENSE you are working with is to modifying the definition of isense-url in isense-3.rkt.
• (isense-project-field name type unit restrictions): Creates a field object.
• (isense-credentials-ckey ckey name): Creates a credentials object based on a contributor key. ckey is the contributor key, and name is the contributor name.
• (isense-credentials-pass email pass): Creates a credentials object based on an email and password.
• (isense-search str (sort "updated_at") (order "DESC") (count -1)): Search projects on iSENSE for a string with the given search parameters.
• (isense-get-project-by-id id): Find a project and return a project object based on the given project id.
• (isense-get-dataset-by-id id): Find a dataset and return a dataset object based on the given dataset id.
• (isense-get-field-by-id id): Find a field and return a field object based on the given field id.
• (isense-create-project cred name fields): Creates a project on iSENSE.
• (isense-add-field project cred type name units (restrictions "")): Adds a field to a project.
• (isense-add-dataset project cred data name): Adds a dataset to a project.
• (isense-append-dataset dset cred data): Appends data to a dataset. Currently does not work.

Project Objects

These are lambdas returned by functions like (isense-get-project-by-id) or (isense-create-project). They use message passing to access the object's properties. Project objects support the following the messages:

Message	Result
'id	The project ID.
'name	A string representing the human-readable name of the project.
'fields	Return a list of field IDs. Call (isense-get-field-by-id) on a given ID to get the corresponding field object.
'datasets	Return a list of dataset IDs. Call (isense-get-dataset-by-id) on a given ID to get the corresponding dataset object.

Dataset Objects

These are lambdas representing datasets returned by functions like (isense-get-dataset-by-id), or by project objects. They use message passing to access the object's properties. Dataset objects support the following the messages:

Message	Result
'id	The dataset ID.
'name	A string representing the human-readable name of the project.
'fields	Return a list of field IDs. Call (isense-get-field-by-id) on a given ID to get the corresponding field object.
'data	Return the data in the datset. This takes the form of a list of lists. The parent list contains list of data sorted by their containing field. Each child list is preceeded by an ID that represents the field the data belongs to. The remaining data in each list is the data for that field in the order it appears on iSENSE.

Field Objects

These are lambdas representing fields. They use message passing to access the object's properties. Field objects support the following messages:

Message	Result
'id	The field ID.
'name	A string representing the human-readable name of the field.
'type	A number representing the type of the field (1 = Timestamp, 2 = Number, 3 = Text, 4 = Latitude, 5 = Longitude).
'unit	A string representing the units the field is in, such as "inches" or "liters".
'restrictions	A list of restrictions to the content of the field. For example, if a field's restrictions are "cat" and "dog", that field can only contain the strings "cat" and "dog".

Uploading Data

The format data is to be uploaded in is identical to the way it is retrieved from the dataset object. That is, it's a list of lists, where each sub-list is a field ID followed by a list of values to put in that field.

quick-net.rkt Documentation

• (read-str-all port): Reads all of the data from a Racket port.
• (get-webpage url): Gets a webpage. If it fails to load the page, it will retry until it eventually works. 404s, 422s, 505s, etc... don't count as the page failing to load, so bad requests shouldn't repeat indefinitely.
• (read-str-all port): Encodes URLs so they don't blow up.
• (index lst): Given a list, create a list of lists where each entry in the original list is numbered starting from one.
• (list-range lst start end): Takes a zero-index start and end position, and returns a list containing the data between those two points.
• (list-partition lst parts): Takes a list and divides it into identicaly sized parts.
• (timed-map time): Returns a version of map that runs for a certain amount of time before prematurely terminating, returning only the results obtained up to that point.
• (timed-filter time): Returns a version of filter taht runs for a certain amount of time before prematurely terminating, returning only the results obtaind up to that points.
• (apply-batch op proc threads lst-args): Distributes a call to map, filter, timed-map, or timed-filter across an arbitrary number of threads and returns the result.
• (json-burrow jsexpr . lst): Kind of like CSS selectors in jQuery. Retrieves data from a JSON structure, or returns false if the path specified is not valid. Paths consist of symbols (for objects), integers (for arrays), and #t (for picking the first thing in a JSON object).

The functions in quick-net.rkt were created in response to the needs of an application I wrote that did lots of web-based batch processing. isense-3.rkt uses some of this functionality, but certain functions like timed-map and apply-filter aren't and should be entirely useless to most people using this library.