Question

I am using CakePHP 1.3. I have successfully created an Indeed DataSource and am looking to create more complicated ones. I am looking into creating a Yahoo Answers DataSource and was wondering about a few best practices. The API exposes a few functions:

1) Ability to search for questions

2) Ability to get questions in a category

3) Ability to get details on a specific question

4) Ability to get details on a specific user

As is, I might only use the question and user search functions. Here are my questions:

1. Do I created 1 DataSource that can perform both tasks or separate ones (i.e. one to find users and another to find questions?

2. If i create 1 DataSource then how do I identify if the model is $this->YahooUser->find() (find users) vs $this->YahooQuestion->find() (find questions) so that I may create the right URL for the request.

Answer 1

Think of a datasource as a Database. For example, CakePHP is distributed with several database-specific datasources (ie. MySql, Oracle, etc.) What you will want to do is create a YahooAnswers datasource.

Here is an example in the docs to show you how to create a Twitter datasource for example:
http://book.cakephp.org/view/849/An-Example

This should help you implement the YahooAnswers API as a datasource.

UPDATE: Here is an example:

<?php 
pp::import('Core', 'HttpSocket');
class YahooAnswersSource extends DataSource {
    protected $_schema = array(
        'users' => array(
            'id' => array(
                'type' => 'integer',
                'null' => true,
                'key' => 'primary',
                'length' => 11,
            ),
            'name' => array(
                'type' => 'string',
                'null' => true,
                'key' => 'primary',
                'length' => 60
            ),
        ),
                'questions' => array(
            'id' => array(
                'type' => 'integer',
                'null' => true,
                'key' => 'primary',
                'length' => 11,
            ),
            'text' => array(
                'type' => 'string',
                'null' => true,
                'key' => 'primary',
                'length' => 140
            ),
        )
    );
    public function __construct($config) {
        $auth = "{$config['login']}:{$config['password']}";
        $this->connection = new HttpSocket(
            "http://{$auth}@yahooanswers.com/"
        );
        parent::__construct($config);
    }
    public function listSources() {
        return array('users','questions');
    }
...
?>