Discussion Ardent Insight — API & Website

Flash Moonboots

Flash Moonboots

Ardent Insight API & Website​

Last update 16 April 2025

Ardent Insight (ardent-insight.com) is the new name for the API and website previously called Ardent Industry (ardent-industry.com).

This change reflects the evolved focus and functionality of the site, as the scope expands beyond trade data to include other features.

The old URLs will continue to work for both web and API access, but to avoid confusion website visitors will be directed to the new URL automatically. Those using the old URLs for API calls can update the hostname at their leisure. The old domains will still be valid for at least the next year or two.

As we can't edit the titles of posts I've had to create this new thread. To avoid confusion, after today I will stop updating the original thread, and only be posting forum updates in this thread.

www.ardent-insight.com​

Source code for website:
https://github.com/iaincollins/ardent-www

Ardent API​

Documentation and source code for the REST API:
https://github.com/iaincollins/ardent-api

Ardent Collector​

Source code for the service that collects data submitted to EDDN and generates reports:
https://github.com/iaincollins/ardent-collector

Ardent Authentication​

Source code for the CMDR Authentication service:
https://github.com/iaincollins/ardent-auth

About this software​

The API was originally created in part to support further development of new features in the app ICARUS Terminal as there were no APIs and / or open source or open data platforms available for some of the data - although data dumps and APIs from EDSM.net, Spansh, EDDB.io (RIP) and the work of EDCD developers, and the EDDN service, are invaluable.

The scope and functionality of the API and the website has grown since inception, and continues to grow, and further improvements are planned. The hope is that some features from ICARUS Terminal will be able to be implemented on the website in some form and enhanced by combining CMDR data from the FDev APIs with data from EDDN, EDSM and other third party APIs.

The goal is embrace new and existing features including exploration, power play, colonisation and to surfacing interesting locations in the game, and to expand and refine the UI for the site to provide an immersive and functional experience. By providing an open API, other developers can use it to augment the data in their own third party tools to improve the player experience.

The UI of the website and some of the features will be familiar to anyone who seen ICARUS Terminal.

home.jpg
system.jpg
trade.jpg
 
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Flash Moonboots

Flash Moonboots
EDSC Info said:
I received an authentication error, despite being approved by Frontier. Any ideas?
Click to expand...
Hmm no I don't know what would cause that.

I've tried signing in and signing out and again and it's okay here. I can see there are a handful of other folks signed in, so I think it's working, but would appreciate any confirmation it's working from other CMDRs.

I'd be interested to see any errors you are getting, to better understand where the problem might be.
 

Flash Moonboots

Flash Moonboots

Update: Improvements to API and Website​

I've made a lot improvements to the API and to the website over the last week - taking full advantage of the long weekend (even if it is only 3 days in Scotland, and not 4 like in England and Wales!).

The API improvements below have not been fully documented yet, I'll be updating the official documentation soon but thought I might as well do a quick write up here.

PS: The roll out of the new features might have cause the API to misbehave and fail to return data for some queries for 2-3 hours yesterday due to an incomplete change being rolled out - sorry about any service interruption!

API improvements​

1. API now supports querying by System Address (64bit integer ID assigned to each system) anywhere the System Name can be used.

In the case of endpoints that take a systemName query parameter, you can now use systemAddress as well (if both are specified, systemAddress is used as it is never ambiguous).

Examples​

2. Querying for a system (by name or by address) will now return a property named disambiguation with an array of other similarly named systems, if there is more than one system with the same name. The API will attempt to match by exact case if the systems are spelt the same, but the case is different. If there are no exact matches, it will still return data for one of them.

Examples​

JavaScript: 
{
  "systemAddress": 85261750986,
  "systemName": "C Velorum",
  "systemX": 844.5625,
  "systemY": -83.1875,
  "systemZ": -35.15625,
  "systemSector": "41087a2dd2d7d0b4",
  "updatedAt": "2022-11-26T00:18:27.000Z",
  "disambiguation": [
    {
      "systemAddress": 84389401298,
      "systemName": "c Velorum",
      "systemX": 299.40625,
      "systemY": -0.3125,
      "systemZ": -7.625,
      "systemSector": "b54462392f48b156",
      "updatedAt": "2022-08-17T09:45:34.000Z"
    }
  ]
}

3. Searching for a system by name will return a Boolean flag ambiguous in the result if there is another system with the same name. You can query the system via the API to get a back a list of the matches for that system.

Examples​

JavaScript: 
[
  {
    "systemAddress": 84389401298,
    "systemName": "c Velorum",
    "systemX": 299.40625,
    "systemY": -0.3125,
    "systemZ": -7.625,
    "systemSector": "b54462392f48b156",
    "updatedAt": "2022-08-17T09:45:34.000Z",
    "ambiguous": true
  },
  {
    "systemAddress": 85261750986,
    "systemName": "C Velorum",
    "systemX": 844.5625,
    "systemY": -83.1875,
    "systemZ": -35.15625,
    "systemSector": "41087a2dd2d7d0b4",
    "updatedAt": "2022-11-26T00:18:27.000Z",
    "ambiguous": true
  }
]

4. You can now query markets for commodities using the Market ID assigned to the station / port / outpost / settlement / megaship (etc), without having to specify the system name and/or station name.
5. API responses for systems, stations and commodities now include the systemAddress property to facilitate querying the API using the new endpoints, to facilitate disambiguation.

6. There are some experimental API endpoints that use the EDSM.NET API to return back information about systems. These are largely just pass through APIs, at least for the moment. Like all the other endpoints, you can now use

Website improvements​

The website has been improved to take advantage of the new features, in the search, system map and system list views, and to the nearest services views, to expand the information displayed and to make it more useful and to better handle edge cases.

There have also been a lot of smaller functional, cosmetic and performance related improvements.
The system view doesn't yet surface all the same data as ICARUS Terminal, but underlying system for mapping out bodies and stations and megaships in a system is vastly superior, and already handles a lot of edge cases where the data is incomplete (or just unusual).

Further improvements are definitely planned! I might turn efforts towards improving the Commodities trade view next - I would like to replace the input elements with better custom inputs and make the UI more flexible.
 

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