I don't work for a solar company but QuickBase is so successful in this industry I have been thinking about starting my own solar company. QuickBase can easily handle this task without involving an external service.
Normally, one web site cannot access data from another web site because of a policy all browsers implement called the
Same Origin Policy. However, the good folks over at
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have made their API work across domains by including a special header in their response that allows access from all domains:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *Because of this you can
directly call this API from QuickBase
without involving an intermediate server.
This is the essential code that will call the API and populate 12 fields with fids 6 through 17 with the ac-monthly values:
var url = "https://developer.nrel.gov/api/pvwatts/v6.xml";
url += "?api_key=DEMO_KEY";
url += "&address=1600 Ampitheater Parkway, Mountain View, California";
url += "&system_capacity=3.05";
url += "&azimuth=180";
url += "&tilt=18.43";
url += "&array_type=1";
url += "&module_type=1";
url += "&losses=11.72";
var fids = [6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17];
$.get(url, function(xml) {
console.dirxml(xml);
$("response outputs ac-monthly[type=array] ac-monthly[type=float]", xml).each(function(index) {
console.log('_fid_${fids[index]}', $(this).text());
$('#_fid_${fids[index]}').val($(this).text());
});
});
You can run this code from the console on an
add or
edit form assuming you have specified your 12 fid values. A complete solution would involve implementing the IOL technique and the appropriate logic to assign the input parameters in the URL.
I am tied up at the moment starting my own solar company but if you need additional help with this task feel free to contact me off-world using the information in my profile:
https://getsatisfaction.com/people/dandiebolt
