Android Question Google Places API... Why doesn't my request work

[Brian Robinson]

HI All,

Has anyone used the Google Places API to do text searches, and if so, can you please help me with how to get the API Key to work. The code I am using is as follows.

I have created the API Key through the developer console and switched on the Places API.

I have tried with multiple keys but the one I believe should work is a Browser based key. It is not linked to any referrers, so should work. I have tried it on the browser on my desktop and phone and the request works. The one thing I am not 100% sure on is the format of the POST request. Can anyone see any problems with what I have there? I am trying to use SandroProxy to intercept the calls and see if I am missing something but am getting other problems there around the ssl certificate.

Public Sub GetPlaces
    Dim Job As HttpJob  
    Dim iDistance As Int = 1
  
    Dim url As String = "https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/textsearch/json"
    Dim query As String = "?query=French+restaurants&Location=" & currLat & "," & currLng & "&radius=1000m&types=food&key=" & Constants.GOOGLE_PLACES_WEB_API_KEY

    Log(url&query)
    Job.Initialize("GetEateries", Me)
    Job.PostString(url,query)
'  
    Job.GetRequest.SetHeader("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.153 Safari/537.36")
      Job.GetRequest.SetContentType("application/x-www-form-urlencoded")  
End Sub

The error I am getting is in the Job.GetString:
{
"error_message" : "An internal error was found for this API project.",
"html_attributions" : [],
"results" : [],
"status" : "REQUEST_DENIED"
}

Any help greatly appreciated...

 

[Erel]

The browser sends GET requests, not POST requests. Try Job.Download instead of PostString.

 

[Brian Robinson]

Awesome!!!! That did the trick Erel.

Thanks for your help. I guess the problem is the other app I have been working on which also gets data from a web service is not written correctly using all POST actions rather than GET when returning values (This is what I thought was the correct way anyway??? Happy to be given an explanation as to why I might be wrong).

Anyways... Now I can continue on, so thank you very much.

Regards
Brian

 

[Erel]

Many web services expect POST requests. It should be defined in the service documentation.

 

[Brian Robinson]

Many web services expect POST requests. It should be defined in the service documentation.

Thanks Erel, will have to remember to keep my eye out for that in the future.