This topic is linked to my blog post on the development of the MWB iPhone app, HERE.
So, I started looking at how I might mirror the Core Data Object Model in drupal and decided to make some changes. Instead of having Citizen as one of the 4 instiutional categories of the Popycycle, it made sense to create Family, with Citizen as child. This also allows me to let citizens float between categories a bit. My thinking is that some citizens "transcend" family to be paragons of one of the other categories. That way, too, each of the major categories are similar, with similar fields and methods to access the subcontent in Citizen and Movie.
Okay, keep going. I need to decide whether I want to use the Drupal Relation module, or some combination of regular Content Types with Field Collections.
Here's the revised data model:
[fancy_header color="supported color name. e.g. red" | class="additional classes"]Various links to APIs I'm using, along with notes:[/fancy_header]
Since iOS7 is due to be released in the Fall, I'm developing on that platform.
I decided to use JSON instead of XML to minimize the amount of data transmission. So, I spent a lot of time doing JSON tutorials and learning about dispatch queues and manual Core Data configuration before discovering the Apache licensed, objective-c framework, RESTKit (which I decided to use):
http://restkit.org/
Some helpful links/tutorials:
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[fancy_header color="supported color name. e.g. red" | class="additional classes"]The EPA's RESTful API:[/fancy_header]
http://www.epa.gov/enviro/facts/ef_restful.html#metadata
Here's the URI format to get a JSON listing of Cabot/Koppers:
http://iaspub.epa.gov/enviro/efservice/cer_site/site_epa_id/FLD980709356/json
SITE_ID 0400903
SITE_EPA_ID FLD980709356
This gets the site info and the site description
http://iaspub.epa.gov/enviro/efservice/cer_site/site_id/0400903/CER_CMT_SITE
This gets SITE_ID (general info), CER_LOCATION (location) and CER_CMT_SITE (description):
http://iaspub.epa.gov/enviro/efservice/cer_site/site_id/0400903/CER_LOCATION/CER_CMT_SITE/
Just location data
http://iaspub.epa.gov/enviro/efservice/CER_LOCATION//site_epa_id/FLD980709356/json
Just descriptions
http://iaspub.epa.gov/enviro/efservice/CER_CMT_SITE/site_id/0400903/json
Just site info
http://iaspub.epa.gov/enviro/efservice/cer_site/site_id/0400903/json
Just site info and site location
http://iaspub.epa.gov/enviro/efservice/cer_site/site_id/0400903/CER_LOCATION/json