A post Easter Weekend saw the opportunity to attempt Llanberis Pass (#189 in Another 100 Great Cycling Climbs) I was staying in Caenarfon and was able to leave reasonably early on a Sunday Morning - this meant that traffic was light. However the weather was not great and I think this kept the traffic level low. I could imagine at other times that traffic could be heavier making it a less pleasant climb It is a fairly steady climb - only a brief peak of ~10% just below the Youth Hostel at the top of the pass at Pen-y-Pass Here's a video starting from Nant Peris:
The latest versin is here: Strava Tool V3 Please use this version
Update - now authenticates programmatically
As per the previous post I have now included programmatic Strava Authentication for the application to take account of the October 15, 2019 change where "Forever tokens are rejected by the server. Old OAuth endpoints for obtaining forever tokens are removed." I have been using a "Forever Token" up to this point. The new version can be downloaded from here
Some other changes have been made. Some bugs have been fixed and I am sure some other bugs will have been introduced. I do use the application myself and its not broken anything yet...
Please, if you use the software use the comment section to let me know what you saw. Add the Traceoutput files (in the application folder) to the message At this moment there is no documentation for this version - this will follow soon See the new Authentication data at the bottom of the application main window:
Note: this page was started 7 April 2019 and has been updated 22 April.
This latest update is to confirm that this code gets the correct access and refresh tokens which, when used to connect to Strava, will get data according to the Scope selected.
I was getting a "401" error when trying to get Activity data. However this was because I was using Scope: read_all which reads "private routes, private segments, and private events for the user". I.e. it does not read Activities for which you need: Scope: activity:read_all "which is the same access as activity:read (i.e. read the user's activity data for activities that are visible to Everyone and Followers, excluding privacy zone data), plus privacy zone data and access to read the user's activities with visibility set to Only You"
This means that this code is a functional (if inelegant, badly written, poorly documented etc) route to get the access tokens needed from October 2019
The Windows PC programme I have written in C# to get my data from Strava and display and analyse in a variety of ways (latest Blog post here: link) has a relatively major failing - that is that it is necessary to manually go through a number of rather non-intuitive steps to get a Strava Access Token. Although its not elegant it was a one-off task until this year. In October 2019 the Strava Authentication method is changing from a non-expiring token (as per my application when I created it) to a time limited token process which then involves re-authenticating every 6 hours. This is described here: link Whilst my application will continue to work (for me) until Oct 2019, using my original non-expiring token, at this point I will need to move to the new process of this time limited token exchange. Anyone wanting to use my application now and follow the process I have documented in the blog will find that they they probably can manually get a token using a similar process it will be a pain and then that token will expire 6 hours later. Therefore to address this I have started to develop a proper authentication solution as I have no choice. I approached this by writing a separate application to test the process and methodology, and then once I had a working system integrate into my original application. I also created a separate Strava account to test this with rather than risk corrupting my current account access and losing my data (more on this later). As before I created (in my new account) an application and registered it. This is documented here: link and here: link I then spent some time reading the documentation to see how it worked. I also manually typed in the html code/links directly into a browser to look at the response so I understood what you needed to send and what answer you got back This a simplified flow diagram of how I believe it works:
There are some prerequisites -like needing a local web server running on your PC to receive the initial Authorisation code
I found a usable sample here: Simple C# Web Server. I don't understand how it works - all I know is that it does. Start the Web server before opening the web page, close it once you have a response. Note that this will open a web page and show the response rather than silently interpreting the reply. This "waiting for a response" behaviour here also caused issues. We need to await the user authorising the Strava Request - at this point we are no longer in a pure Synchronous programming mode.
To address this I have user a timer to await the web server responding - this loops until either a timeout is reached or a successful authentication is achieved. I tried to use async and await but could not get this to work - I need to do more research and some other programme examples. Once we have the response from the Web server we can post to the Strava oauth link and get the short term access codes. I believe that I have created a robust piece of code that does all of that and I wrote this in a small test application:
This application robustly returns codes and an expiry time. Initial testing in the main Strava application however got a "404 not authorised" response - this is where more testing is required, but as explained above has now been resolved by selecting the appropriate scope Don't bother using these tokens as they are already expired!
The source code is here: Source Code. In theory, unzip the file, copy the contents into a folder, and using Visual Studio Open the solution "Strava_Autenticate_V3" (I could not spell "Authenticate" correctly!). Compile/build and it should run Any feedback I would welcome, especially if there is an error. Please note I am not a software developer - I am an engineer who can write software - I know there is a big difference. Again - for my poor design and coding - I am happy to receive constructive feedback
