While I could’ve probably just scraped a website, I ended up building my CLI project by making requests to an Application Programming Interface (API) which is basically a tool to access the hashes nested inside an array. My API was An API of Ice and Fire(https://anapioficeandfire.com/) This API is an open one - which means authentication is conveniently not required to request data from the API.
Here’s a taste of what an API request will return from this URL with following address: hash = { “url”: “https://anapioficeandfire.com/api/books/1”, “name”: “A Game of Thrones”, “isbn”: “978-0553103540”, “authors”: [ “George R. R. Martin” ], “numberOfPages”: 694, “publisher”: “Bantam Books”, “country”: “United States”, “mediaType”: “Hardcover”, “released”: “1996-08-01T00:00:00”, “characters”: [ “https://anapioficeandfire.com/api/characters/2”, “https://anapioficeandfire.com/api/characters/12”, “https://anapioficeandfire.com/api/characters/13”, “https://anapioficeandfire.com/api/characters/16”, …….. } The array of characters is quite lengthy so I tried to limit each book to 20 characters. Each book is a hash and all the books are inside an array. By iterating over the array and the accessing each property with hash[“url”] , you can map over each property and make sure that each new instance of a Book is initialized with each property.
Creating new instances of Characters actually took me the longest time. Ultimately, I was able to refactor my code into two separate methods, one that collected the character_url and another that saved the instance of Character based on the url passed in.
One thing I would warn anyone about this project is don’t create relationships between objects if you don’t absolutely have to; get the data your CLI requires and keep it simple. Honestly, I struggled a lot on this project. I spend days where zero progress was made, despite my best efforts. Ultimately, I spent way more time building this than was outlined in the Syllabus. I know I learned some valuable lessons, ultimately the limited coaching I received was probably a good primer for coding in a real professional environment, without any handholding.
While I did not finish my project the way I wanted to, I know that for me to have done this on my own, using the site I choose, was probably next to impossible. However, I was able to create Book objects and Characters objects with the attributes and data provided by the API. I learned an incredible amount about trial and error, error messages, the difference between .map and .each, and so much more.