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Greetings all,
I was discussing some time-saving MOC parts ideas and I came up with an idea for
a software utility that could significantly reduce the amount of time spent
digging around for loose parts. Currently, to the best of my knowledge, when
someone wants to build a MOC with parts they don't currently have, they have a
few options: 1) they can go to WalMart, Target, Bricklink, eBay or another
online source and order parts one at a time, 2) they can buy whole sets that
have the parts in them from the places in (1), 3) trade with friends for the
parts they need, or 4) wait for LEGO to (hopefully soon) come out with the
propsed (upgraded/improved) Digital Designer custom/MOC system and use only the
current LEGO factory parts for their MOCs and make due with that (good but
limited) inventory.
For those of us who've ordered parts from Bricklink (my current favorite place
to shop for MOCs) it can take a very looong time for any major project or large
list of parts to be located and identified at one or more Bricklink stores, one
part at a time. You have to individually key punch in every single piece that
you are looking for and input into your wanted list, or simply do this
on-the-fly for each particular store.
Personally each batch/lot of loose parts I've ordered has taken a few hours just
to put together. I may be a little slow, but this has to be repeated for each
lot if you buy from more than one store. I'm not complaining about Bricklink's
capabilities: quite the opposite -- I think it's capabilities are a godsend to
many AFOL's and their younger counterparts.
I'll get to the point now: is there currently or in-the-works someone writing a
program/applet that can take a tag-delimited parts list (such as a Peeron,
LUGNET, MS Excel spreadsheet, etc.) cross reference it with Bricklink's engine
(or another) and automatically spit out a batch-order for either one or all
stores that get hits from the user's list?
In other words, let's say that I have a parts list containing 60 line items. I
can get 45 of them from Used Brick Liquidators (my favorite) and the other 15
from three other stores. If I had to start from scratch, I would have to enter
each part manually into the storefront of UBL and the three other stores, after
I individually located them using Bricklink's search engine. This could take a
few days if I was crunched for time. But if I had this new feature/application,
I could input my specially-formatted parts list (generated from MLCad, Peeron,
or MS Excel, or whatever) and it would crunch through all the data in a
batch-processing style and display an editable shopping cart-style order form
for each store.
These stores could be selected from a list, or from the user's profile, or after
the search engine found the hits and displayed the options next to each part. I
believe this way of ordering could save a lot of time. If I'm lucky, it may be
already done. But I'm afraid something like this might be too ambitious for our
community to tackle, or a lack of interest/will to integrate this into the
Bricklink engine.
If anyone has thoughts on this, let me know. I know this post sounds
complicated, but I tried to capture some of the technical/developer aspects into
the problem description in order to stimulate some ideas. If I were to try and
do this myself, I'd probably never finish it due to my weak programming skills,
plus, I'd need the Bricklink people's permission, without which could render
this a stillborn idea.
Dave H.
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