How can I call an API (for example Flickr API) in Ruby on Rails? Newbie question

Question

Im building my first app in rails and I would like to call Flickr's API

I know I can use flickr-fu, rflickr or other gem but I want to do it myself from scratch to learn

Say, for example, I want to call flickr.photos.comments.getList that returns the comments for a photo. The arguments are api_key and photo_id. I have both.

I will get the response as an xml

<comments photo_id="109722179">
<comment id="6065-109722179-72057594077818641" author="35468159852@N01" authorname="Rev Dan Catt" datecreate="1141841470" permalink="http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/109722179/#comment72057594077818641">
Umm, I'm not sure, can I get back to you on that one?</comment>
</comments>`

I want to store the data received by calling that method into a variable comments that I can access the data using, for example,

comments.all.first.author_name = "Rev Dan Catt"

or

comments.all.first.content = "Umm, I'm not sure, can I get back to..."

How can I do this? Please be patient (sorry for the noob question)

Answer 1

include 'rubygems'
include 'httparty'

class Flickr
  include HTTParty

  base_uri 'api.flickr.com'

  def self.getPhotos(uid)
    return get('/services/rest/', :query => {
      :method => 'flickr.people.getPublicPhotos',
      :api_key => 'api key goes here',
      :user_id => uid})
  end
end

and then call

Flickr.getPhotos('12345678')