Search places by keywords with HMS Site Kit - Huawei Developers

Hello everyone, in this article series, I will tell you about what is HMS Site Kit and how to use it’s features. With HMS Site Kit, you can basically provide users with easy and reliable access to services to related to locations and places.
With the HMS Site Kit, we can provide them make use of this features while helping users to to discover world quickly;
We can take place suggestions according to the keywords that we have determined,
According to the location of the user’s device, we can search for nearby places,
We can get detailed information about a location,
We can learn the human readable address information of a coordinate point,
We can learn the time period where a coordinate point is found.
In the first article of Site Kit series, I will give you an information about how to setup Site Kit to Android project and how to use Keyword Search.
How to integrate HMS Site Kit to project?
First of all, we need to create a signed Bundle/APK of our project. For this, you can follow the steps which have shown in the picture below.
We can start to creating signature by clicking on the Build->Generate Signed Bundle/APK menu on Android Studio. Then, we can start the process of generating a signed APK by selecting the APK option on screen that comes up.
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By pressing the Create New button on the screen that comes up, we can determine the path, password, key alias and key password values of the .jks file to be created for our application. Informations in the Certificate field is not mandatory.
After clicking OK button, we can continue the APK signing process by entering our password informations.
Then, we can complete the signing process by choosing which version of our application we want to sign such as release and debug, together with the signature versions.
After completing this process, we need to make configurations of this signature file in the build.gradle file at the app level of our application.
Code:
signingConfigs {
release {
storeFile file('SiteKitDemo.jks')
keyAlias 'SiteKitDemo'
keyPassword '****'
storePassword '****'
v1SigningEnabled true
v2SigningEnabled true
}
}
buildTypes {
release {
signingConfig signingConfigs.release
minifyEnabled false
proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android-optimize.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro'
}
debug {
signingConfig signingConfigs.release
debuggable true
}
}
After performing this process, we can perform the operations related to Gradle synchronization by clicking on the sync now button.
After performing this process, we need to add ‘SHA-256 certificate fingerprint’ value of our application to AppGallery Connect.
We can learn value of ‘SHA-256 certificate fingerprint’ via termianl/CMD. For this, we need to go by terminal to the bin folder under the jre(Java Runtime Environment) installed on our system and run the command below.
Code:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre1.8.0_251\bin>keytool -list -v -keystore <keystore-path>
We will see a screen output as follows. Here, we need to get the value of SHA256.
We need to add this SHA256 value which we have received to the General Information field in the Project Settings menu on AppGalleryConnect. After performing this process, we can download the agconnect-services.json file.
After performing this process, we need to enable Site Kit service in Manage APIs tab on Project Settings tab.
We need to add agconnect-services.json file which we have downloaded, to under app folder on Android Studio of our project as follows.
After performing this process, we need to add Maven libraries and dependency values on build.gradle files.
First of all, we need to open build.gradle file at the project level and add the lines shown below:
Code:
// Top-level build file where you can add configuration options common to all sub-projects/modules.
buildscript {
ext.kotlin_version = '1.3.61'
repositories {
google()
jcenter()
maven { url 'https://developer.huawei.com/repo/' } // HUAWEI Maven repository
}
dependencies {
classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:3.6.1'
classpath "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-gradle-plugin:$kotlin_version"
// NOTE: Do not place your application dependencies here; they belong
// in the individual module build.gradle files
def agcpVersion = "1.3.1.300"
classpath "com.huawei.agconnect:agcp:${agcpVersion}" // HUAWEI agcp plugin
}
}
allprojects {
repositories {
google()
jcenter()
maven { url 'https://developer.huawei.com/repo/' } // HUAWEI Maven repository
}
}
task clean(type: Delete) {
delete rootProject.buildDir
}
After performing this process, we need to add plugin and dependency values in the build.gradle file at the app level as follows.
Code:
apply plugin: 'com.huawei.agconnect'
...
...
dependencies {
...
def siteKitVersion = "4.0.3.300"
implementation "com.huawei.hms:site:${siteKitVersion}"
}
To prevent HMS SDK from hiding, we need to add following lines of code to proguard-rules.pro file which is located under the app folder.
Code:
-ignorewarnings
-keepattributes *Annotation*
-keepattributes Exceptions
-keepattributes InnerClasses
-keepattributes Signature
-keepattributes SourceFile,LineNumberTable
-keep class com.hianalytics.android.**{*;}
-keep class com.huawei.updatesdk.**{*;}
-keep class com.huawei.hms.**{*;}
HMS Site Kit — Keyword Search
Thanks to this feature provided by Site Kit, we can search for many places such as tourist attractions, restaurants, schools and hotels by entering information such as keywords, coordinates.
Thanks to the data from this search result, we can easily access many different information about places such as name, address, coordinates, phone numbers, pictures, address details. Within the AddressDetail model, we can easily access information about the address piece by piece through different variables and change the way the address’ notation as we wish.
First of all, after sharing sharing the method what we can search by keyword, we will examine these pieces of code and parameters one by one.
Code:
fun keywordSearch(coordinate: Coordinate, keyword: String, radius: Int,
pageIndex: Int, pageSize: Int, countryCode: String){
val searchService = SearchServiceFactory.create(context,
URLEncoder.encode(
"Your-API-KEY",
"utf-8"))
var request = TextSearchRequest()
request.query = keyword
request.location = coordinate
request.radius = radius
request.pageIndex = pageIndex
request.pageSize = pageSize
request.language = Locale.getDefault().language // Getting system language
request.countryCode = countryCode
searchService.textSearch(request, object: SearchResultListener<TextSearchResponse>{
override fun onSearchError(searchStatus: SearchStatus?) {
Log.e("SITE_KIT","${searchStatus?.errorCode} - ${searchStatus?.errorMessage}")
}
override fun onSearchResult(textSearchResponse: TextSearchResponse?) {
var siteList = textSearchResponse?.sites
siteList?.let {
for(site in siteList){
Log.i("SITE_KIT", "Name => ${site.name}," +
"Format address => ${site.formatAddress}, " +
"Coordinate => ${site.location.lat} - ${site.location.lng}, " +
"Phone => ${site.poi.phone}, " +
"Photo URLS => ${site.poi.photoUrls}, " +
"Rating => ${site.poi.rating}, " +
"Address Detail => ${site.address.thoroughfare}, ${site.address.subLocality}, " +
"${site.address.locality}, ${site.address.adminArea}, ${site.address.country}")
}
} ?: kotlin.run {
Log.e("SITE_KIT","There is not any site")
}
}
})
}
First, we need to create a SearchService object from the SearchServiceFactory class. For this, we can use the create() method of the SearchServiceFactory class. We need to declare two parameters in create() method.
The first of these parameters is context value. It is recommended that Context value should be in Activity type. Otherwise, when HMS Core(APK) needs to be updated, we can not receive any notification about it.
The second parameter is API Key value that we can access via AppGallery Connect. This value is generated automatically by AppGallery Connect when a new app is created. We need to encode API parameter as encodeURI.
We need to create a TextSearchRequest object to perform searching by keyword. We will perform the related search criteria on this TextSearchRequest object.
While performing the searching operation, we can set many different criteria as we see in the code snippet. Let us examine the duties of these criteria one by one if you want to:
Query: Used to specify the keyword that we will use during the search process.
Location: It is used to specify latitude and longitude values with a Coordinate object to ensure that search results are searched as closely to the location that we want.
Radius: It is used to make the search results within in a radius determined in meters. It can take values between 1 and 50000, and its default value is 50000.
CountryCode: It is using to limit search results according to certain country borders.
Language: It is used to specify the language that search results have to be returned. If this parameter is not specified, the language of the query field we have specified in the query field is accepted by default. In example code snippet in above, the language of device has been added automatically in order to get a healthy result.
PageSize: Results return with the Pagination structure. This parameter is used to determine the number of Sites to be found in each page.
PageIndex: It is used to specify the number of the page to be returned with the Pagination structure.
Once we have determined our criteria, we can start the search using textSearch() method of SearchService object. textSearch() method takes two parameters.
First parameter is TextSearchRequest object which we have defined above. Here, our search criterias are defined.
For the second parameter, we need to implement SearchResultListener interface. Since the SearchResultListener interface is generic, we need the data type that results will return here. Here we can specify TextSearchResponse class that is model provided by Huawei Site Kit. This interface contains two methods, onSearchError() and onSearchResult() methods. We can configure these methods according to logic of our program and take necessary actions.