Our team's project is about searching and managing places of interest to visit based on a destination city. In this system, users can search places in a city with filters that they want to find. After getting a list of places, the user can click on each place to get further information(e.g., google map link). Users can also save the city as Favorites, so they can refer to after closing the results page. The system can also save each search's information with the city, filter, and the searching time. In case users want to see know what filters can be selected, they can get filters that are available in this system in the main window.
The program is going to include multiple features.
- Searching: Users can search places in a city with filters. If the city is not in the system, users will receive a "city not found" message. If the filter is not in the system, users will receive a "filter not found" message. If the city and filter are valid, users will get a list of places.
- Getting filer: Get Filter use case allows users to look up and choose a specific filter for their place want to search. There are more than 500 filters overall, and up to 4 levels of choice for more precise filtering. Once the user has chosen their filter, by clicking "Apply this filter", the selection is simply inputted to search space and no need for user to do extra operations.
- Finding places information: After getting the list of places, user can click on each place to get further information.
- Managing saved places: After clicking on each place, if users are interested in this place they can click on the "Save as favorite" to save it for late use.
- Managing searching history: Each time when users search something, the system will save the information of the search. Users can click "get history" to get the search history. Conversely, users can clear all the searching history by clicking "clear history".
- Searching and filtering (By Arnnav, Nicolas, and Jia)
- Getting filters (By Andrew)
- Finding places information (By Nicolas)
- Managing saved places (By Arnnav)
- Saving searching history (By Jia and Arnnav)
- Clearing searching history (By Jia)
Geocoding API can translate the names of cities and filters to Geoapify-friendly IDs. Therefore, Our program can use the ID of cities and filters to search with Places API.
https://www.geoapify.com/geocoding-api
Places API can search places in a city and narrowing down the ranges of places with a filter using the ID from Geocoding API.
https://www.geoapify.com/places-api
To use the API to launch the main, the first step is to open this website: https://www.geoapify.com/places-api.
After clicking log-in on this website, there is a link to create an account on the log-in page. Users can create an
account to get the API key.
After logging in the account, users need to first add a new project to generate the API key. Simply click the "Add a new
project" and add a project name.
After creating a new project, there is an existed API key in the project. SImply copy the API key and return to the
program.
There is a three-dot button at the top of IntelliJ, simply click it and click the "Edit" to edit the configuration.
After clicking the "Edit" button, change the Environment Variable to "API_TOKEN=API_KEY" and API_KEY is the API key that
users just copied from the Places API.
After opening the project, the main window will show two search boxes to enter a city and a filter, and several buttons
including "Get filter", "Search", "Saved Places", "Get history", and "Clear history".
After entering a valid city name and a filter, users can click the "Search" button to get a list of places.
Users can access all filters available in this system by clicking the "Get filter" button. Also, they can add filter
from the broad category to a narrow category.
After getting a list of places, users can get detailed information by clicking each place.
If users want to save a place for future use, users can click the "Save as favorite".
After saving the place, users can find it by clicking "Back" and clicking "Saved places".
After each search, the search information will be saved in the system, which can be found by clicking "Get history". If
users want to clear all history, just click "Clear history".
We hope you enjoy the PlaceFinder!