Motivation

Using the official website is quite tedious and lacks some modern functionalities. So when searching for Zvgs I thought i could improve that and write a custom tool. It combined a lot of stuff i was interested in learning more at the time, like data fetching from the web, playing around with API calls and using Firebase.

Development

This was my first deep dive into firebase, which I really learned to love. It provides a nice user management and NoSQL DB backend, which is easy to use and has an amazing free tier for small developers like me.

The initial trigger for starting the project was, that I found out the official zvg-portal simply makes a POST request with certain parameters to query its backend DB. So with some reverse engineering by looking in the source code of the web page, which basically contains all their JS, I found the parameters needed to write my own requests. These returned html code, so I used bs4 to extract all the data I needed. This was extremely tedious as the data is very messy, but I think the current solutions got everything handled.

Now with a clean way to fetch data, all that is left is store it in a well-structured way in my database and create a scheduled runner to update the data daily.

Only now we are at a point to even start developing an App. The goal was to have a nice open interface for everyone to look at the structured data, maybe set custon favorites and have all links and files ready. I wrote a react native app and had fun using all the cool features of firebase, which made a very powerful and feature rich app from rather simple code.

Results

As always, even though the goal of react native was to have an app for all systems, I still could only officially release it on Google Play, where I already have a Dev-account, as publishing apps on iOS costs money.

The app is without ads, collects only the data that is absolutely needed and is completely free.

If you have any comments or ideas to improve the app, please contact me :-).

Further Information

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.datavisions.zvgvision