Getting routeConfig for multiple routes and/or getting data for nearby stops

[Ahmed El-Khuffash]

I'm not sure if this group is still active...

I'm planning to add a simple piece of functionality to get bus/street car times for stops near a user, so I need to search by latitude/longitude.

Unfortunately, looking at the public list of APIs, there's no way to do this directly (surprising!). I do see the NextBus official app uses a separate API, that does seem to have this. Is this API publicly accessible?

http://nextbus.com/api/pub/v1/locations/43.667572553517964,-79.37185627417774/predictions?maxDistance=1600&key={PRIVATE_KEY_HERE}&timestamp=1591207338644

I'm guessing it isn't.

The only alternative I could figure out:

• Make an API call to routeList to get all 174 routes in the agency I want (TTC)
• Make an API call to routeConfig 174 times to get the config details for each route, including start and stops
• routeConfig's documentation says if you omit the r parameter, you'll get all the agency's routes if it's less than a 100, but you'd have to batch calls if they're more than a 100
• Is there any way to batch this call with multiple route tags? I couldn't figure it out
• Do a search in-app for all stops found in routeConfig
• Do a call to predictionsForMultiStops to get the predictions for the stops found in the step above

Is there an easier method or some sort of other logic I'm not seeing?

[Steve Caine]

I have not used this API in many years because NextBus dropped the agency my app follows (Boston MBTA), but I think I recall that you could request multiples in routeConfig by chaining routeTags, ex. "r=1,2,3,4,5". Give it a try.

If documentation says some calls must be batched, that means such a batch command is available. No (competent) service would document a requirement that could not be fulfilled by their API.

[Ahmed El-Khuffash]

I've tried that, but unfortunately I get an error. I also tried chaining it with a pipe as a separator.

I also tried passing multiple r=94&r=74, but that only returns the first one

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[Steve Caine]

In fact, it may be possible to request ranges, e.g., "r=1-99".

[Darwin O'Connor]

The way to do this is to load the routeConfig data into a database and they query it for what you are looking for.

On Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 3:21:01 PM UTC-4, Ahmed El-Khuffash wrote:

[Steve Caine]

Sorry, I didn't see your reply until posting my followup. Beyond that suggestion, I don't have anything to offer w/o diving back into the API, which I currently don't time to do.

[Steve Caine]

Yes, but his issue is how to acquire that data in the first place so it can be put into a database. Once you've done that, the challenge becomes knowing when a routeConfig has changed.

My app (used to) make a separate request for each route served by a given stop when users asked for predictions for that stop. It didn't batch, but it did cache (keeping the XML response for up to 7 days). 

If I were to have added a "find nearest stops" feature, I would have used the approach you suggest. Since Boston MBTA is no longer served by NextBus, the issue is moot for me.

But the approach I would have used would be to make the 176 requests from my own computer -- spaced over time -- then accumulate those XML files and create a database which I would preload in the app. The app would then update its copy of that database over time with new routeConfig requests as needed, following some logic I would have devised for that need.