879437 - Request to expose unique app id (slug) in the App Object

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Marketplace Graveyard :: Consumer Pages, defect, P1)

Description

[Caitlin Galimidi [:c8o]]

From: Ran Ben Aharon <[e-mail]>
Date: June 4, 2013 12:41:42 PM PDT

Hey Caitlin, we have stumbled upon a crucial issue while progressing with the new features.

Marketplace apps and installed apps do not share a unique identifier.
This makes it difficult for us to correlate between the two. We need it in order to:
* Indicate to our server which apps we need more info on.
* Deduplicate download suggestions.

Marketplace apps have a unique identifier called slug.
Is it possible for the FxOS dev team to expose it in the App object?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/App 

Thanks, Ran

Comment 1

[Caitlin Galimidi [:c8o]]

Team - 

E.Me is working to expose Firefox Marketplace apps in their search results for v1.1.
Anyone have an opinion on who should be eyes-on, weighing in on this bug?
Could use guidance to engage with Ran so they can continue with build and test for this feature.

Thanks muchly!
Caitlin

Comment 2

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

This sounds like a good question for Fabrice.

Comment 3

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

Note to triagers - hold off on triaging this for now. We need to do some technical and product analysis first to figure out:

1. Is this the solution we want to do? Or is there different approaches that should be considered?
2. What's product take on what release this needs to be targeted for?

[1] I have needinfo on Fabrice for. [2] I'm putting needinfo on Peter to figure out what to do here.

Comment 4

[[:fabrice] Fabrice Desré]

I don't know enough about what the goal is here. In general, each app has a unique ID which is its manifest URL. Also, we won't expose anything that is "Mozilla Marketplace"-specific on App objects. It's not clear to me if this bug also applies to apps installed from other sources.

Comment 5

[Caitlin Galimidi [:c8o]]

This is specifically related to E.me and is an E.me request. 
Ran Ben Aharon will chime in and provide details. :-)

Comment 6

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

Per comment 4, I'm confused why this is needed. You can get the manifest URL from the client-side code that you can directly compare against marketplace apps that use the same manifest URLs. So exactly why won't that work?

Comment 7

[Ran Ben Aharon [:ranbena] EverythingMe]

The feature we're working on is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=873167

I just want to clarify what we need to integrate it smoothly.

Basically, all we need is a single unique id per app, that is applicable both for identifying installed apps, AND for opening app info pages on the marketplace app. On Google Play they have a single java-ish id (org.wikipedia) - and it can be used inside the phone and on the store URLs.

The problem is that the FxOS Marketplace API does not accept the manifest URL to identify apps. If it would that would be great. Or at least some shortened hash of it.

We can change the way our model work and include a unique internal id and a unique store id, but we figured that for the sake of simplicity, having one id that applies for both would make things smoother and more compliant to other stores.

Comment 8

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

(In reply to Ran Ben Aharon (Everything.me) from comment #7)
> The feature we're working on is
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=873167
> 
> I just want to clarify what we need to integrate it smoothly.
> 
> Basically, all we need is a single unique id per app, that is applicable
> both for identifying installed apps, AND for opening app info pages on the
> marketplace app. On Google Play they have a single java-ish id
> (org.wikipedia) - and it can be used inside the phone and on the store URLs.
> 
> The problem is that the FxOS Marketplace API does not accept the manifest
> URL to identify apps. If it would that would be great. Or at least some
> shortened hash of it.

That sounds like a problem on the marketplace side, not the client side.

Bouncing over to marketplace.

Comment 9

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Rob suggests we implement an app detail view rather than a search, something like /api/v1/apps/by_manifest/https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fmanifest.webapp .  I think that's a fine idea.

Comment 10

[Ran Ben Aharon [:ranbena] EverythingMe]

Will, you're referring to the API request but we're interested in the marketplace app web page: https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/{id/slug/manifest_url}

Better yet, have the WebActivity accept manifest_url as data:
var activity = new MozActivity({
  name: "marketplace-app",
  data: {manifest_url: "http://soundcloud.com/manifest.webapp"}
});

Also, perhaps consider accepting a shortened hash of the manifest_url, to reduce bandwidth consumption (E.me sends multiple manifest_urls to the server),

Comment 11

[Andy McKay]

The marketplace app web page uses the API, so both have to change.

Comment 12

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

What do you want to use for packaged apps?  We're allowing them to have an origin right now, but they aren't being enforced as unique on the device, afaik.

Comment 13

[[:fabrice] Fabrice Desré]

(In reply to Wil Clouser [:clouserw] from comment #12)
> What do you want to use for packaged apps?  We're allowing them to have an
> origin right now, but they aren't being enforced as unique on the device,
> afaik.

They are unique on device. We can't support having the same origin for 2 packaged apps, because that would lead to potential resource overlaps in different packages.

Comment 14

[Rob Hudson [:robhudson]]

wip:
https://github.com/robhudson/zamboni/commit/ed02b15 

Andy, could you take a quick look? Tastypie isn't liking the new URL and always returns a 404.

Comment 15

[Andy McKay]

This is now even simpler, we'll ensure that the Search API can take a manifest_url. And fireplace will cope with that, as detailed in 883402. Rob, could you ensure that manifest_url is available in the search?

Comment 16

[Rob Hudson [:robhudson]]

https://github.com/mozilla/zamboni/commit/89f819a 

Requires the 'search-api-es' waffle to be enabled.

Comment 17

[Iulian Timis]

Please add STR here or mark it with [qa-] if no QA is needed.

Comment 18

[Ran Ben Aharon [:ranbena] EverythingMe]

Is there any way to test this on a device right now?

Comment 19

[Rob Hudson [:robhudson]]

(In reply to Ran Ben Aharon (Everything.me) from comment #18)
> Is there any way to test this on a device right now?

Only on the backend in our API. E.g.:
https://marketplace-dev.allizom.org/api/v1/apps/search/?manifest_url=https://mobile.twitter.com/cache/twitter.webapp

The front-end handling is bug 883402.

Comment 20

[Christopher Van Wiemeersch [:cvan]]

Searching for `:manifest={manifest}` will now return the app in Fireplace's search results:

https://marketplace-dev.allizom.org/search?q=%3Amanifest%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Flittlealchemy.com%2Fmanifest.webapp