How To Get The Payment Rewards Of A Steemit User, In Less Than 50 Lines

PHP is still a widely used programming language and its versatility makes it perfect for server-side coding. That's why I decided to write a set of tools interacting with the Steem blockchain in PHP, and today I'm going to walk you through a very short tutorial in which you'll learn the following:

• use the php-steem-tools package via composer
• instantiate one of the classes in your project
• calculate the total payout for a certain user

This tutorial requires moderate knowledge of php and composer.

Without further ado, let's start.

Step 1: Add php-steem-tools in composer.php

Install composer (this is out of the scope of this tutorial, but if you need a good start, the Composer website has a very good documentation). Open composer.php and add the following lines:

{
    "minimum-stability" : "dev",
    "require": {
        "dragos-roua/php-steem-tools": "v0.0.4-alpha"
    }
}

The current version of the package is 0.0.4-alpha, and you need the "minimum-stability" setting to be at the "dev" level.

Step 2: Require the package and instantiate the Steem API

Create a file (in the same folder as composer.php) and require the package:

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

Now you'll have access to all the classes you included in the composer.php file. Let's instantiate the API. Add the following lines:

$config['webservice_url'] = 'steemd.minnowsupportproject.org';
$api = new DragosRoua\PHPSteemTools\SteemApi($config);

Now, the $api variable will contain a new API object which will query the data from the webservice_url address. If you want to query a different node, just change this address.

Step 3: Pick an author and make a call to the API

Ok, we have an object, but we didn't make any call. Let's pick an author, in our case utopian-id and then prepare the API call:

$author = "utopian-io";
    
date_default_timezone_set("UTC");
$dateNow = (new \DateTime())->format("Y-m-d\TH:i:s"); 
$date_8days_ago = date('Y-m-d\TH:i:s', strtotime("-8 days", strtotime($dateNow)));
$params = [$author, "", $date_8days_ago, 100];

$remote_content = $api->getDiscussionsByAuthorBeforeDate($params, "websocket"); 

Basically, we set up an array of 4 objects, containing the $author, the date from which we start, which is 8 days ago, and the number of posts to search that we start with, in this case 100. If there are less than 100 posts, the API call will return just the posts that are there, if there are more, than it will initiate another call until it grabs all the posts.

With that array set up, we call the function getDiscussionsByAuthorBeforeDate($params, 'websocket'). The second parameter is the transport layer used, in this case websocket. You can also use curl if you want, I find websocket to be faster.

Step 4: Iterate through posts and build the total

Now that we made the call, all we need to do is to browse through the returned posts and build the total:

if(isset($remote_content)){
        if (array_key_exists('error', $remote_content)){
            echo "Something is not ok. You should investigate more.\n";
        }
        else 
        {
            $total_value = 0;
            
            foreach($remote_content as $rkey => $rvalue){
                if($rvalue['pending_payout_value'] !== '0.000 SBD' && $rvalue['max_accepted_payout'] != 0){
                    
                    $tmp = explode(" ", $rvalue['pending_payout_value']);
                    $payout = $tmp[0];
                    
                    // check to see if we have something in the beneficaries array
                    if(count($rvalue['beneficiaries'] != 0)){
                        foreach($rvalue['beneficiaries'] as $kk => $vv){
                            if($vv['account'] == $author){
                                $payout = $payout*($vv['weight']/10000);
                            }
                        }
                    }
                    $author_payout = $payout * 0.75;
                    echo "Author payout: ".$author_payout.", Total post payout: ".$payout."\n";
                    $total_value += $author_payout;
                }
            }
            echo "Total payout for $author: ".$total_value." (SBD + STEEM)\n";
        }
    }

The error checking is really minimal in this example, but in real life you would want to take into account all the possible problems that may appear. The error that we're treating here is just a malfunction of the blockchain, but we may also catch a non-existent user, for instance (this one would make a good homework).

Then we just iterate over the array of posts and look into the payout field. If there is something to be paid and if the author didn't decline payout all together, we start building a total. As a precaution, we also look into the beneficiaries array and see if there's anything there.

The result of the command php authorPayments.php:

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Ta-daa! In less than 50 lines you got the payments of a Steemit user. Of course, there are many other improvements that can be made: add the comments payout, calculate the SBD / STEEM ratio, error checking and so on.

If you want to get the source code form this tutorial, check out the folder "examples" from the php-steem-tools Github repository.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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You can also vote for me as witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses

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If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):

• Rewards: Were Does The Money Come From?
• Netiquette: How To Avoid Being A Steem Douche?
• Witnesses: What Are They And Why Should You Care?
• How Can I Mine Steem And What CPU / GPU Power Do I Need For That?
• The Beginner Guide To Not Getting Hacked On Steemit

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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