Codea DropBox tutorial

Comments

• Briarfox Mod

  March 2013 Posts: 1,542

  I keep getting "The Request to Link the App is Invalid" on the dropbox page
• aciolino

  March 2013 Posts: 666

  @BriarFox, did you make an app in DropBox first? If so, you have a key/secret that you pass to the DropBox constructor.

  What does your main() look like?
• Briarfox Mod

  March 2013 Posts: 1,542

  Yeah I setup an app on the dev page. Called it CodeaDB. I've entered and re-entered the key and secret.

  main is

  function setup()
  
      --displayMode(FULLSCREEN)
      --the app info to connect to. These come from your DropBox app developer page. 
      --I am not giving my key out in an open forum!
      appKey = "v1*************"  --app key
      appSecret = "sa*************"  --app secret
      db = DropBox(appKey, appSecret)
  
• aciolino

  March 2013 Posts: 666

  That looks right. I'm going to ASSUME you didn't make a mistake with the keys.

  I also just validated that I can still use DropBox integration on 1.5, it was OK, though it gave me a warning because I'm using http.get().

  Keep in mind that you had to go through all three steps. So, which step are you getting stopped at?
• Briarfox Mod

  March 2013 Posts: 1,542

  aciolino, i must have made a mistake. I re coppied and pasted and it worked! Very neat code. thanks for sharing it. its going to be very useful.
• aciolino

  March 2013 Posts: 666

  You're welcome! Glad it's working!
• Jmv38 Mod

  March 2013 Posts: 3,297

  Very interesting work @Aciolino. Thanks for sharing.
• Briarfox Mod

  March 2013 edited March 2013 Posts: 1,542

  I was having an issue reading the key and the secret from storage. It always required the variable appKey and appSecret in main.lua

  I added self.appKey and self.appSecret to line 51 &52 of DropBox.lua

     assert(self.appKey ~= nil, "You must assign a DropBox application before accessng DropBox.")
      assert(self.appSecret ~= nil, "You must assign a DropBox application before accessng DropBox.")
  
  
• Ignatz Mod

  March 2013 edited March 2013 Posts: 5,396

  I went through all the steps and set up Dropbox, and put my keys in your code, but it's the final stage that confuses me a little

  I set up Main like this

  function setup()
      d=DropBox()
      d:GetRequestToken()
      d:DoAuthorize()
      d:GetAcccessToken()
  end
  

  This opened up an approval request in Safari, which I authorised. After a few seconds I went back to Codea, which was showing this:

  Ready to GetAccessToken
  error: [string "function setup()..."]:5: attempt to call method 'GetAcccessToken' (a nil value)
  Ready to authorize
  

  Am I supposed to do something back in Codea? And if I get this working, do I have to go through this authorization every time I use Dropbox, or is it one time? Sorry about all the questions!
• Briarfox Mod

  March 2013 Posts: 1,542

  Just run the main.lua from the gist to set it up. then link to your project. All i did in my project was:

  db = DropBox() -- I set the key and secret in global so i pass nothing.
  db:Write(name,data)
  

  and it worked
• Ignatz Mod

  March 2013 Posts: 5,396

  It's ok, I'm an idiot. I copied and pasted from the gist page, not realizing there were three files to copy. Now it works. And it's cool.
• Briarfox Mod

  March 2013 Posts: 1,542

  @Ignatz, grab one of the gist loaders and pull from gist directly into codea.
• Ignatz Mod

  March 2013 Posts: 5,396

  @aciolino I've built this function to create backups only when the version number changes, so you can safely call it in setup at the start of each run, knowing it isn't going to clutter your Dropbox account or write over your last good backup. It stores backups in a Backup folder (deleting any extra copies made in the root folder as well). The only issue is that it requires an awful lot of support code (DropBox plus JSON), so I suppose if I use this in practice, I'll set references to a separate Dropbox project rather than importing it. Improvements welcome.

  function DropBox:Backup(proj,ver) -- proj=project name, ver=version number
      if ver~=readProjectData("Version") then
          local tabs=listProjectTabs()
          local txt=""
          for i=1,#tabs do
              if tabs[i]~="DropBox" and tabs[i]~="JSON" then
                  txt=txt..readProjectTab(tabs[i])
              end
          end
          fName=proj.."_"..ver..".txt"
          self:Write(fName, txt, function() 
              self:Copy("/"..fName, "/Backup/"..fName, 
                  function() print("Version "..ver.." backed up") end)      
                  saveProjectData("Version",ver)
               self:Delete("/"..fName, callback)
          end)
      end
  end
  
• aciolino

  March 2013 Posts: 666

  Just so that you know, DropBox checks to see if your file is different and if it's not, it doesn't update it...I think...
• Ignatz Mod

  March 2013 edited March 2013 Posts: 5,396

  Thank you - but that doesn't affect why I did it this way. If I'm tinkering with a project, I may try something out, find it doesn't work, and want to go back to how it was before. If Codea keeps overwriting my latest version every time I make a change, I will have nothing to go back to. So I want my backups to be at specific checkpoints.
• Jmv38 Mod

  March 2013 Posts: 3,297

  To keek intermediate versions, i long press on the project, and make a copy with a version number at the end of the name.
• aciolino

  March 2013 Posts: 666

  Lol - version control! Who needs it!?

  Actually, the version number idea is pretty good, though I usually do a backup to DropBox, then on a PC, zip the directories with today's date.