[Rets-dev] Looking for help with Retriever and Metadata

[Robert Davis]

I prefer to not use compact-decoded myself, as most "decode" values
aren't very useful. For example, a city with a code of "17" might have a
decode value of "Houst" when what it really means is "Houston". I think
the blame for that generally falls on the MLS, not the companies
implementing the RETS Servers. I know that there are a lot of people out
there displaying the information exactly the way it comes out of the
MLS, misspellings and abbreviations and all, but some of us insist on
doing a better job than that.


Robert Davis


-----Original Message-----
From: rets-dev-bounces at rets.org [mailto:rets-dev-bounces at rets.org] On
Behalf Of JP
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 9:31 AM
To: Rets-dev at rets.org
Subject: Re: [Rets-dev] Looking for help with Retriever and Metadata


Hi Robert,

When I first read your message, it put me in an "A ha! That's it!  
Hurrah!" mood. I've now read up on the difference between compact and
compact-decoded, but alas, I'm already asking for the data in compact-
decoded. It looks liek RETS 1.5 doesn't state an explicit MUST on the
decode, which make me wonder if the compact-decode is not always fully
decoded? What I'm seeing specifically is numeric codes for cities on one
RETS server, and on another RETS server, the name of the listing office
is a few-letter code. ("Colisted by MOOF" doesn't look as good as
"Colisted by CowDog Realty".)

Yes, we are storing the data in a database, so we don't query the RETS
server but a few times a day. The data stored in our DB is normalized
into the XML format that our client uses, it's not a straight copy of
the RETS results, but yes, we're being lightweight on the servers. :-)

Thanks again for any advice!

best,
Jeff


> Sounds like you should be downloading data in the COMPACT-DECODED 
> format rather than Compact or XML-Standard. Compact-Decoded should 
> have all lookup codes decoded for you in the output. I'm not familiar 
> with the Retriever program, so I do not know if it gives you the 
> option to specify format. If not, you should be able to find in the 
> code where it specifies the format and change it. If it is currently 
> using COMPACT format, the switching to COMPACT-DECODED probably won't 
> break anything unless it is putting the values into a database. If it 
> is (and it should, in my opinion), then you would need to modify the  
> field sizes to allow for larger values.
>
>
> Robert Davis
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: rets-dev-bounces at rets.org [mailto:rets-dev-bounces at rets.org] On 
> Behalf Of JP
> Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 2:21 PM
> To: rets-dev at rets.org
> Subject: [Rets-dev] Looking for help with Retriever and Metadata
>
>
> Hello,
>
> We're working on a product called StreetSurfer that shows real estate 
> listings on a screen in an agent's office window. It's a technically 
> simple application that fetchs a minimal amount of data from MLS using

> RETS -- currently via Retriever (PHP library) -- twiddles the data 
> around a bit to fit into our client, and then sends the data to the 
> client for display in the window. We're up and running, and the 
> product's working great for its current purpose. (See http:// 
> www.locamoda.com/ for a bit more, for the curious. :-)
>
> I'm the primary developer responsible for figuring out how to get the 
> MLS data into our system, and am running up against some issues having

> to do with RETS metadata for features we need in our next version.
> Speciically, when I run a query for, say, all properties with a 
> listing office id of, say, BB111111, the return data, depending upon 
> which MLS server we're connection to, sometimes contains codes for 
> columns like cities or listing agent office name, instead of the 
> actual text value.
> We're not using retrieiver in the standard mode; we're calling a few 
> of the subroutines manually inside of it, populating the data 
> structures with values coming out of SQL, instead of flat 
> configuration files.
> I'm
> wondering if there's a way to instruct Retriever to convert any 
> metadata / codebook values to their normal values, but am not sure 
> what is needed to do this.
>
> We're looking for any pointers, or ideally someone in the Boston area 
> who'd be able to consult with us for a few hours, helping sort out any

> misconceptions and point us in the right direction. I suspect this is 
> almost a one-liner, but not being experienced with RETS or Retriever, 
> I've been stuck a bit longer than I like.
>
> Thanks!

_______________________________________________
Rets-dev mailing list
Rets-dev at rets.org
http://lists.rets.org/mailman/listinfo/rets-dev