The third step of creating a presentation application is to select its data services. Every presentation application depends on at least some data services, whether from the default Yahoo! index, extracted microformats and RDF, feeds, or custom data services.
Data Service checkboxes — Selects whether to include the specified collection of data services in your presentation application. Selecting a checkbox does not mean that the data automatically displays in your presentation application, only that the data becomes available in the next screen, “Step 4: Appearance”. Avoid adding data services that you do not need, as too many data services will clutter the next screen.
To determine whether you need a particular data service, click on the service to inspect the service's individual components. You can optionally select the checkbox next to a specific data field, to indicate that the field is required for your application to function (these checkboxes only show up for default data services). If you select one or more of these, SearchMonkey will not run your application, even if it matches your specified URL triggers. This could be very useful to create an infobar application, that only shows up when Yahoo! Directory data exists, or if a phone number has been extracted for a given URL.
If you need additional data services, click Add More Data Services or Make your own Data Service.
Add More Data Services — Displays the Data Service Library dialog. This dialog lists all available data services, including:
data provided by the Yahoo! Search Crawler
partner feeds (native DataRSS)
all "Web Service" style data services
any "Page" style data services that are compatible with your presentation application's Trigger URL Pattern
The Data Service Library dialog enables
developers to share their custom data services with others. As an
example, if some other developer has published a custom data service
named "Spanish Wikipedia" that triggers on the pattern
es.wikipedia.org/wiki/*, and your presentation
application triggers on those same pages, SearchMonkey displays the
"Spanish Wikipedia" data service for you to use.
The dialog also displays any custom data services that you have created but not yet published and made public. Unpublished data services remain private and only usable by their creator.
By default, the dialog lists all "Web Service" style data services, since web services have no trigger URLs. If the list of web services grows too long, SearchMonkey enables you to filter them out with the Show selection box.
To add a data service, click the service's checkbox and click . To return to the main SearchMonkey screen without adding another data service, click .
— Saves your changes and directs you to the Custom Data Service screens. If none of the available data services contain the information you need to build your application, you can create a custom data service to extract this information from an existing web service or collection of (X)HTML pages.
If you use this link to create a data service, SearchMonkey pre-populates certain fields such as the trigger and test URLs, on the assumption that you are creating a data service specifically to work with the current presentation application.
— Saves your changes and continues to “Step 4: Appearance”.
— Saves your changes and returns to “Step 2: URLs”.
— Returns to the Application Dashboard.
At the bottom of the screen is the Preview Pane, which enables you to view your presentation application as it acts on your test URLs. To display anything useful in the Preview Pane, you must first choose data services and map data to the presentation layer. For more information about the Preview Pane, refer to “Step 4: Appearance”.
