#05 ­- Block System

[amansrivastava]

Objective

At the end of this course, you will be able to

Create "Block Types" with fields
Place Multiple Instances of the block type with different field values
Programmatically update block instance values / content

Exercise

• Create a Block type called "Stock Exchange Rate Card"
  • Company Name
  • Symbol
  • Last Price
  • Change
• Create Instances of the block with different sets of values and place them at different spots on the site. Example values ­ (Apple, AAPL), (Bank of America,BAC), (Transocean, RIG), (Freeport, FCX). (Ignore the Last Price and Change fields’ values, we will be dealing them in next step).
• Below API can be used to retrieve Last Price and Change values http://dev.markitondemand.com/MODApis/Api/v2/Quote/json?symbol=BAC&callback=myFunction
• Build a custom module, which on Cron run,
  • Iterates through each instance of blocks of type "Stock Exchange Price Card"
  • For each block, take the symbol value and call the API to retrieve the Last Price and Change values
  • Update the block field values programmatically with the values of Last Price and Change retrieved from the API and save the block