Subject:
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Automatic download of unofficial parts in LDView
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw
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Date:
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Sun, 14 May 2006 07:13:01 GMT
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Viewed:
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2749 times
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I’m working on a feature in LDView where it will automatically check the parts
tracker for unofficial parts when it encounters a file that it can’t find. This
has the potential to produce a fairly large amount of requests to the parts
tracker, so I have some questions.
First of all, is this acceptable for LDView to do? It can definitely make the
user experience much more enjoyable when opening other people’s files that use
unofficial parts. But on the other hand, it will generate an as-yet unknown
amount of additional traffic to the parts tracker.
Looking at LDView’s SourceForge.net download page, I see that as of now there
have been 1734 downloads of the LDView 3.0 executables (1811 total LDView 3
downloads minus 77 source downloads). From that, I think it’s safe to say that
the number of unique LDView users is probably at least 500 and more likely in
excess of 1000.
I will definitely configure it to not check for any particular file more often
than some certain threshold. The threshold will be at least one day, but could
probably realistically be set to a week. This threshold will be client-side,
though. That means that every user will have their own unique list of files
that have been checked “recently”. Note that even if it has downloaded an
unofficial file, it will still need to check the tracker to see if the file has
been updated since it was downloaded. This will use the same “recently”
threshold.
Furthermore, there’s really no way to tell purely based on the filename if the
file is a part. So any models that reference missing sub-assemblies will cause
LDView to check the parts tracker for these sub-assemblies. On top of that,
there’s no way to tell if the file is a primitive (unless it’s in the 48/
directory). So every primitive will first have to be queried as a part. When
that fails, it will be queried as a primitive. Additionally, every file that
doesn’t have an s/ prefix will be queried as a primitive if no part exists.
This particular problem could be fixed server-side, though, if there was some
new base URL added that automatically checked for the file as a part, and then
automatically checked as a primitive if the part didn’t exist. (If LDView
successfully downloads a file once, it will remember what it is, thus preventing
the double check when checking to see if the file has been updated on the
tracker.)
So, to the admins of ldraw.org, what do you think?
--Travis
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