- or a shout-out to the various services of apilayer.com
Sorry about the intended pun in the title - but it will all make sense.
Have you ever wanted to know the various VAT rates in the EU - no? - well neither have I, because it might put me in a bad mood, but it fits the intended pun for the post, and I also wanted to show how it is done from from Delphi.
The mother company of Embarcadero, Idera acquired another company early this year - this time apilayer.com, which provides numerous "simple" cloud-based API services - among these are:
- IP geolocation and reverse lookup
- Language detection
- Mail address validation
- Phone number validation
- Flight tracking
- Currency conversion and rates (including crypto currency)
- Weather data and forecast
- News, Headline and Stock apis
- Conversion PDF and scraping
But go to https://apilayer.com/, and read more about their various layers and tiers for these.
We will in this short demo look at the vatlayer - which does EU VAT stuff.
So I started by signing up for the free tier on https://vatlayer.com/ - which gives you an API access key and access to a dashboard. As always do not share the access key - just saying.
Now you can fire up Delphi, create a new application and either use the REST Debugger or just manually throw in the REST component or create runtime - what you prefer.
I just threw in a edit control and a couple of memos and buttons, as seem above. And then I added an parameter on the RESTClient with the access_key - since I wanted to clear the request parameters on the RESTRequest, but keep the access_key. And set the BaseURL property to http://apilayer.net/api.
I just took two of the methods/resources from https://vatlayer.com/documentation - so the VAT lookup button looks like this:
var
json: TJSONValue;
begin
Memo1.Clear;
RESTRequest1.Method := rmGET;
RESTRequest1.Resource := 'validate';
RESTRequest1.Params.Clear;
RESTRequest1.AddParameter('vat_number', LabeledEdit2.Text, pkGETorPOST);
RESTRequest1.Execute;
if RESTResponse1.StatusCode=200 then
begin
json := RESTResponse1.JSONValue;
Memo1.Lines.Add(json.GetValue<string>('company_name'));
Memo1.Lines.Add(json.GetValue<string>('company_address'));
end;
end;
..and the VAT rates for HU (since they have a higher VAT rate than DK :D) button looks like this:
var
json: TJSONValue;
begin
Memo2.Clear;
RESTRequest1.Method := rmGET;
RESTRequest1.Resource := 'rate';
RESTRequest1.Params.Clear;
RESTRequest1.AddParameter('country_code', 'HU', pkGETorPOST);
RESTRequest1.Execute;
if RESTResponse1.StatusCode=200 then
begin
json := RESTResponse1.JSONValue;
Memo2.Lines.Add(json.Format());
end;
end;
There nice twists to these - by IP address or get list of rate types - and if combining these services by apilayer.com - I could make a speeding white-van "whistle-blower" mobile app - since all company owned registered vehicles in DK - need to have their VAT numbers on their fleet.
So I could lookup the company and their address, get their phone number by a different api layer - and then call and tell on them - MUHAAHAAAHAA (evil laughter)
..or maybe I should just create something useful and fun.
And the best part about writing this post, I now learned that Denmark has only the second highest VAT rate in EU :D
/Enjoy
