Discussion About to start a new tool, what's the best way to get data out of the game?

[Tyr_Arcana]

Greetings Commanders,

I'm about to start work on a new tool to help me keep track of engineering materials, and I would like to know what the best way(s) to get hold of data regarding their collection and expenditure from the game. I believe parsing the journal files saved locally will probably be easiest, but if I ever get it to a point where I'm ready to release it, it would be nice to support console players as well, to which I was curious about the API that Inara uses to download data from Frontier. A quick search hasn't brought anything recent up in the way of documentation for that. I also know that apps like EDMC have APIs for plugins to them, but I don't know what (dis)advantages that would have over just parsing the journals directly.

Basically I could use any help or pointers to documentation about getting data out of the game.

Thank you.

 

[Artie]

The simplest and best way is certainly to use the local journal files. For the console players, you will need to fetch their journals from the Frontier's server using the OAuth authentication (the official instructions here, you can see some implementation details in source code of various tools). But that isn't very suitable for any kind of realtime updates as the local journal files are (as there always need to be a whole journal for the day downloaded, the journal updates on the server may be slightly behind until a new journal chunk is written and also it cause an extra load to the server, which may compromise functionality of other tools using it).

 

[amcb10]

Are you aware of EDEngineer? This already does what you are proposing.

 

[Tyr_Arcana]

The simplest and best way is certainly to use the local journal files. For the console players, you will need to fetch their journals from the Frontier's server using the OAuth authentication (the official instructions here, you can see some implementation details in source code of various tools). But that isn't very suitable for any kind of realtime updates as the local journal files are (as there always need to be a whole journal for the day downloaded, the journal updates on the server may be slightly behind until a new journal chunk is written and also it cause an extra load to the server, which may compromise functionality of other tools using it).

That's exactly what I was looking for thank you. Are the journals downloaded that way the same as their local versions (other than being delayed), or are the contents different?

Are you aware of EDEngineer? This already does what you are proposing.

I wasn't aware. That does look to do most if not all of what I was intending, so you've likely saved me a lot of work there in not re-inventing the wheel, thank you.

 

[amcb10]

You are very welcome Commander.

 

[Artie]

That's exactly what I was looking for thank you. Are the journals downloaded that way the same as their local versions (other than being delayed), or are the contents different?

There may be minor differences (like Shutdown event is not present there or some startup events may be missing sometimes (no idea why, may be a random issue) ), but generally - yes, it's the same.

 

[Tyr_Arcana]

There may be minor differences (like Shutdown event is not present there or some startup events may be missing sometimes (no idea why, may be a random issue) ), but generally - yes, it's the same.

Fantastic, that makes things a lot easier. Thank you commander. Also, thank you for Inara, it's an absolutely fantastic site. o7

You are very welcome Commander.

Thanks. Although, having now tried actually using ED Engineer, I'm tempted to write my own anyway just to provide a slightly less awful interface. I get that it's supposed to be used as a transparent overlay over the game window, and I'm sure it's a useful tool... but it's just so ugly to look at.