Documentation of the Elvis Package “Wunderground”

Overview

https://www.wunderground.com/weather/api offers a Web service that you may use after registration to access weather data and forecasts – in a certain amount (as of July 2016: max. 500 requests per day, max. 10 per minute) even free of charge.

Update November 2018 – The Weather Company announces:

“The WU API has been around since 2010 to help you develop apps and websites as well as manage your Personal Weather Station data. During that time, we’ve watched you build amazing products and visualize weather data with creativity and purpose.

Over the years, our infrastructure has been unable to keep up with the growing numbers of users coming to us for API data. This has led to higher costs as we worked to keep the service stable and dependable. Eventually, we realized we’d need to make drastic changes or risk serious problems for our API.
As a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire the Weather Underground API. The Weather Company, which acquired WU back in 2012, offers a powerful suite of enterprise-grade APIs that might be better suited to meet your scale and performance needs while offering a broader range of weather data. You can see these products here .
Here’s what you need to know going forward:

• Your subscriptions, and therefore access, will continue to work through 12/31/2018 .
• If you are a paying WU API customer , you will receive a call from a representative from The Weather Company, and IBM business, to discuss transition options to other API services. If you’d like to have these conversations sooner, contact us .
• If you are a Personal Weather Station owner , you will receive more information about our plan to offer free access to the data you provide to Weather Underground. We’ll reach out once that plan has been finalized.
• For developers who use WU API data for non-commercial purposes , you will have access to a new plan for a personal use, low call volume API. Stay tuned for more details as we build this out.
• The WU Forum will continue to be the best place to connect, keep you informed, share your feedback and get your questions answered as we go through this process.

We are grateful for your commitment to Weather Underground and appreciate your understanding and support as we work through this process. These changes will allow us to continually improve our services and develop new features to keep WU a thriving place for you for many years to come.”

Please contact our support if you need assistance with the change to another weather service.

Update August 2018 – It is no longer possible to create new API keys free of charge. Existing keys still work, however. A possible alternative is darksky.net; please ask our support if you need help on this.

Please read about the exact conditions at the Web address given above.

How to

After adding the package via the package manager (since Elvis 3.3.31) to the server project, the configuration file WOL.xml is available (hint for earlier Elvis versions below).

Next, a new datapoint port has to be created in the server project: Right-click on the server project -> Add -> Add Server data -> Port with Datapoints. Name the new elvissc File e.g. “Weather.elvissc”.

Then add a new port in this file (name it e.g. “Wunderground”) and select „GenericWebClient“ as driver type. Configure it further in the properties window:

Now you can create datapoints using this port for the individual data transferred. The configurations file already extracts the element current_observation from the response; the data contained there are documented at https://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/d/docs?d=data/conditions#response_fields:

Useful datapoints are e.g.:

Hint on earlier Elvis versions

In Elvis versions before 3.3.31, please use the following procedure instead of the package manager:

• Download the file wunderground.xml and add it to the server project (right click -> Add -> Existing Item… ein.
• Select the file in the solution explorer and change the property Copy to output directory to “Copy if newer”.