Hello!
I am building an app with EV Chargers and I am using this API to fetch the data. I’ve run into a problem. I do not really know what kind of charger connection types there are. I want to show the user the appropriate logo for each charger and also let them filter the chargers based on the types. Is there a list of what kind of types the API can give me? Thank you!
Yours faithfully,
Iraklis Eleftheriadis
Hi, to get a list of connection types, network operators etc suou need our core reference data API at https://openchargemap.org/site/develop/api#/operations/get-referencedata
Hi, to get a list of connection types, network operators etc suou need our core reference data API at https://openchargemap.org/site/develop/api#/operations/get-referencedata
Does your API have a logo icon for each Charger type?
No, we do have some SVG icons here:
And the mapping of the connector type id to icon is in the app is here: ocm-app/Utils.ts at 3330c9de96a6db551605a08fe716c59e0fca6a88 · openchargemap/ocm-app · GitHub
Thank you! I guess those are not all the possible icons, right? One more question. As I see, you have the option with your API to let users comment on a charger or let them upload an image. Do they have to be registered with OpenChargeMap, or can they do it through my app?
Comments/checkins require an authenticated session against an OCM user id. It’s up to you whether that’s a single login you app uses or it’s the users own login but note there is no Delete API so once a comment has been submitted there is currently no API to remove or update comments and instead you have to sign into openchargemap.org and choose my profile > my comments to delete those.
Yes there are many other connection types as you will find in our /referencedata API endpoint, no we don’t currently have icons for them all.
So basically, I can use my own OCM account to let other users on my app leave a comment/checkin or upload an image, correct? Can I use their own username and profile picture instead of mine? On the documentation I see that you include a userName parameter (description: This is an optional name to associate with the submission, for authenticated users their profile username is used) but not for a profile picture. Last question, what do you mean by checkin? What’s the purpose of checkins and what are they? Thank you in advance!
No, originally it was possible to submit anonymous comments and set the username to an arbitrary value but not anymore. A comment and checkin are the same but a checkin is just the concept that you have actively charged at or failed to charge at a location.
Personally I would encourage that users should use their own OCM login so they can control their own data, otherwise if they post a comment saying “Hi if you want me to move call 5551234!” it will be under your username and under your control, then if they decide posting that data wasn’t a good idea for a public Open Data dataset they’d have to get you to delete it. If something gets posted under your own user account and then becomes a copyright or other legal issue (such as a user making a slanderous comment) then it clearly points to you, not them. Either way you need to make it clear that their comments are going to be publicly distributed.
If you don’t really want users to require login, you could also just implement your own comments database - you don’t have to use ours.