Use JSON API in Kivy

Question

I'm currently reading O'Reilly's Creating Apps in Kivy and there's an example that I can't get to work correctly because at the time he wrote the book openWeatherMap didn't require the API key (APPID) but now it does. I'm a novice programmer and don't know how to change the code so it will work.

This is the main.py source code:

from kivy.app import App
from kivy.uix.boxlayout import BoxLayout
from kivy.properties import ObjectProperty
from kivy.network.urlrequest import UrlRequest
import json

class AddLocationForm(BoxLayout):
    search_input = ObjectProperty()

def search_location(self):
    search_template = "http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5" + "find?q={}&type=like"
    search_url = search_template.format(self.search_input.text)
    request = UrlRequest(search_url, self.found_location)

def found_location(self, request, data):
    data = json.loads(data.decode()) if not isinstance(data, dict) else data
    cities = ["{} ({})".format(d['name'], d['sys']['country'])
        for d in data['list']]
    self.search_results.item_strings = cities
    print("\n".join(cities))

class WeatherApp(App):
    pass

if __name__ == '__main__':
    WeatherApp().run()

and this is weather.kv source code:

AddLocationForm:

<AddLocationForm>:
    orientation: "vertical"
    search_input: search_box
    search_results: search_results_list
    BoxLayout:
    height: "40dp"
    size_hint_y: None
    TextInput:
        id: search_box
        size_hint_x: 50
    Button:
        text: "Search"
        size_hint_x: 25
        on_press: root.search_location()
    Button:
        text: "Current Location"
        size_hint_x: 25
ListView:
    id: search_results_list
    item_strings: []

The code's simple. You put a city name in textbox and hit search and it confirms it by showing the name it received.

Answer 1

OK, so I don't know if I'm late or not but having bought this book recently, I too found myself stuck exactly in this problem. Upon Googling this issue, I happened to stumble upon your question as well as O'Reilly link for this book. This is what the author had to say about this problem:

"I've confirmed the issue; openweathermap has changed their query process and the urls in the book are now all broken. This is going to utterly ruin the reader experience for all new readers; we'll need to do an update and should maybe talk about a second edition."

Luckily a good Samaritan found out the solution to this problem. But in order to do so you must first create a free Open Weather account. After creating the account, you'll get an API key. It'll be in your profile.

So, now this code:

search_template = "http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5" + "find?q={}&type=like"

becomes:

search_template = "http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/find?q={}&type=like&APPID=" + "YOUR_API_KEY"

This worked for me. I know I'm 3 months late and probably by now you'd have gotten your answer, but I thought this will be useful for those who run into similar problems and their Google result will bring them to this place.