External APIs

The following feature is only available in the Premium version of the plugin.

Meal Tracker currently supports Fatsecret's Food and Recipe API. If enabled and set up correctly, your users will be able to search Fatsecret's online library for meals to add to their collection. This saves them manually entering the information for a given meal, instead, the title, description and other information such as macronutrients are automatically copied to their collection.

How to setup

• Via the WordPress Admin menu, navigate to "Meal Tracker" > "Settings".
• Open the tab "External Sources".
• Follow the instructions under the heading "Fat Secret API". This includes visiting https://platform.fatsecret.com/api/Default.aspx?screen=myk, creating an account with FatSecrets and retrieve your Client ID and Secret.
• Whitelist your server IP. By default, FatSecrets will block all incoming connections, so you must whitelist your servers IP address in the FatSecret's admin panel.
• At this point, you should be able to fetch data from the FatSecrets API. This can be tested by clicking the button "Perform a test search for 'apples'". If succesful, you should see the following response:

Success: Results have been found for "apples"Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [name] => Candied Apples
            [description] => Feeling deprived at Halloween?  A spooktacular substitute.
            [calories] => 92
            [meta_proteins] => 5.82

• Ensure "Yes" is selected under the heading "Enabled".

What the user sees

Once enabled, when a user searches their own meal collection, they will see a new button under the heading "Add a new meal to your collection" labelled "Search". Clicking this button opens the dialog for searching Fatsecrets.

Search results are displayed in the dropdown box. Clicking on a meall will copy it to the user's meal collection.