geonames-entity-lookup

1. Overview
2. Installation
3. Use
4. API
5. Development

Overview

Finds places in geonames. Meant to be used with cwrc-public-entity-dialogs where it runs in the browser.

Although it will not work in node.js as-is, it does use the Fetch API for http requests, and so could likely therefore use a browser/node.js compatible fetch implementation like: isomorphic-fetch.

For queries, we use the geonames search service: https://secure.geonames.org/searchJSON?q=${encodeURIComponent(queryString)}&maxRows=10

To show full page preview of individual places we in effect call: https://geonames.org/[placeId].

Installation

npm i geonames-entity-lookup

Use

import geonamesLookup from 'geonames-entity-lookup';

username

GeoNames is a free service but it requires a user account. This should be provided through CWRC-GitWriter configuration (see more here: https://github.com/cwrc/CWRC-GitWriter).

If you want to use it as a standalone, you can provide the user name adding the following line to index.js: credentials.username = '${YOUR_USERNAME}'

You can create a free user account here account: https://www.geonames.org/login

API

findPlace(query)

where the 'query' argument is an object:

{
    entity:  "The name of the place the user wants to find.",
    options: "TBD"
}

findPlace returns a promise that resolve to an object like the following:

{
   "description": "Paris is the capital and largest city of France. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-Franc…",
   "id": "https://geonames.org/4345345",
   "name": "Paris",
   "nameType": "place",
   "originalQueryString": "paris",
   "repository": "geonames",
   "uri": "https://geonames.org/4345345",
   "uriForDisplay": "",
   "externalURI": "https://geonames.org/4345345"
}

There is another method mainly made available to facilitate testing (to make it easier to mock calls to the geonames service):

getPlaceLookupURI(query)

where the 'query' argument is the place name to find and the methods return the geonames URL that in turn returns results for the query.

Development

CWRC-Writer-Dev-Docs describes general development practices for CWRC-Writer GitHub repositories, including this one.

Mocking

We use fetch-mock to mock http calls (which we make using the Fetch API rather than XMLHttpRequest).

Continuous Integration

We use Travis.

Release

We follow SemVer, which Semantic Release makes easy. Semantic Release also writes our commit messages, sets the version number, publishes to NPM, and finally generates a changelog and a release (including a git tag) on GitHub.