Census.soe.com - Preparing For the Future

Originally, the EverQuest II API was developed in Python -- accessing a MongoDB database -- while the Planetside 2 API was written in Java -- accessing a number of different data sources and databases.

For a long time, it has been possible to access the same EQ2 data at either census.daybreakgames.com/ or http://census.daybreakgames.com/ , however the latter has behaved a bit differently and lacked some functionality, preventing us from using it.

At this juncture, SOE is preferring Java development, rather than maintaining the old Python code, so in recent weeks, efforts have been made by Platform to bring feature parity to Census.soe.com such that it could at one point replace Data.soe.com.

First, please note that there is ABSOLUTELY NO TIMETABLE or specific plans to shut down census.daybreakgames.com. However, if you operate an EQ2 API-powered website, it's advisable that you do some testing to ensure that your website will operate with data pulls from http://census.daybreakgames.com/.

 

For the most part everything seems the same. I do notice that some items with certain characters don't work on census the way I was searching. Example:

works: census.daybreakgames.com/xml/get/eq2/item/?displayname=Dortimus, Wand of Defiance
doesn't work: http://census.daybreakgames.com/xml/get/eq2/item/?displayname=Dortimus, Wand of Defiance

 

I bet it's the comma

the following link works, doing a partial name lookup
http://census.daybreakgames.com/xml/get/eq2/item/?displayname=/Dortimus

 

Doesn't seem to work well with spells... Neither Census or Data work:
spell
but an exact search does
exact name

Also I prefer exact search (although I combine it with ID for items with the same name),
because for some items like Adventurer's Shortsword of ... there are 16 results...

 

I've sent these off to the SOE folks that are working on the Java version at census.daybreakgames.com. I'll post again here if they end up fixing these or presenting work arounds.

Dethdlr
EQ2U Lead Programmer

 

The SOE folks just pushed the latest fixes to census.daybreakgames.com. and all those listed above as not working seem to be working now.

If you find any other issues, post em and we'll see about getting them ironed out as well.

 

Just a note, I did find a difference between the two API hosts.

When joining a collection via c:resolve and limiting fields, census.daybreakgames.com will automatically add the 'id' field, while the census.daybreakgames.com host does not. It's as simple as just adding it to the field list to work around this.

I just wanted others to know what I had found, so they can skip the 20-30 min of troubleshooting before I had found the source of the issue.

 

I use Chrome only sometimes. I may start using it more because not only is it a more popular browser than the Old Standby Firefox (which I also rarely use today...) but it seems to have all the fun development tools. Thanks!

 

Note that the URLs in the "works, doesn't work" list are not actually properly encoded. The space should be encoded as an escape, at least. URLs with spaces may work with some web frameworks, but they shouldn't work with any.

The same about foo=] and foo=> searches. The ] and > should be URL escaped, but census.daybreakgames.com accepts them either way, while census might not.

 

BTW, is there any chance of a jml-format output from census? I can of course write a local tool to do it, but while developing that was hands-down the best feature I found to human-read the json output.

 

I don't know if you use Chrome or not, but if you do, try this out: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jsonview/chklaanhfefbnpoihckbnefhakgolnmc

That was the suggestion the SOE folks gave me back in September when I pointed out that Census didn't support jml. Works pretty well.

 

I'm gonna miss the heck out of JML.

The JSON formatting plugin for Chrome is not bad, but it doesn't have the path hinting inherent in SOE's census.daybreakgames.com.

 

Being new to wanting to make a website myself how can one go about managing one using the data pull from Census over APL???

 

What is APL?

Also just to update this thread, census.daybreakgames.com has been turned off and now redirects to census.daybreakgames.com so all requests go through census.daybreakgames.com.