Currently we only load the homepage, so there's only actually one
wearable item to sync up! But here's the task to do it!
To do this, we also created the backing model NCMallRecord, where we'll
save the current NC Mall state!
This doesn't connect to anything yet, I'm just doing the beginnings of
loading NC Mall item data!
My intent is to run this regularly to keep our own NC info in the
database too, primarily for use in the Item Getting Guide. (Could be
useful to surface in other places too though!) This will help us split
items into those that can be one-click purchased with the NC Mall
integration, vs NC items that need to be acquired by other means.
Yay, we got the API endpoint for this! The `linkage` scope is the key.
Rather than pulling back the specific fallback behavior we had wrote
for usernames before, which was slightly different and involved
appending `neopass` in there too (e.g. `matchu-neopass-1234`), I
figured let's just use a lot of the same logic, and just use the
preferred name as the base name. (I figure the `neopass` suffix isn't
that useful anyway, `matchu-1234` kinda looks better tbh! And it's all
fallback stuff that I expect serious users to replace, anyway.)
Note: I validated this was working by temporarily changing the URI to
`https://echo.free.beeceptor.com`, which echoes the headers back, then
called `OwlsValueGuide.load_itemdata` directly.
Note: I validated this was working by temporarily changing the URI to
`https://echo.free.beeceptor.com`, which echoes the headers back, then
called `NeopetsMediaArchive.load_file_from_origin` directly.
This was a bit tricky! When I initially turned it on, running
`rails swf_assets:manifests:load` would trigger database errors of "oh
no we can't get a connection from the pool!", because too many records
were trying to concurrently save at once.
So now, we give ourselves the ability to say `save_changes: false`, and
then save them all in one batch after! That way, we're still saving by
default in the edge cases where we're downloading and saving a manifest
on the fly, but batching them in cases where we're likely to be dealing
with a lot of them!
Now we're *really* duplicating with Impress 2020's system lol, but I
need a way to not keep trying to load manifests that are actually 404,
which are surprisingly plentiful!
This doesn't actually stop us from loading anything yet, it just tracks
the timestamps and the HTTP status! But next I'll add logic to skip
when it was 4xx recently.
I'm gonna also use this for a task to try to warm up *all* the
manifests in the database! But to start, just a simple one, to prepare
the alt styles page quickly on first run. (This doesn't really matter
in production now that I've already visited the page once, but it helps
when resetting things in dev, and I think more it's about establishing
the pattern!)
The Neopets Media Archive is a service that mirrors `images.neopets.com`
over time! Right now we're starting by just loading manifests, and
using them to replace the hacks we used for determining the Alt Style
PNG and SVG URLs; but with time, I want to load *all* customization
media files, to have our own secondary file source that isn't dependent
on Neopets to always be up.
Impress 2020 already caches manifest files, but this strategy is
different in two ways:
1. We're using the filesystem rather than a database column. (That is,
manifest data is kinda duplicated in the system right now!) This is
because I intend to go in a more file-y way long-term anyway, to
load more than just the manifests.
2. Impress 2020 guesses at the manifest URLs by pattern, and reloads
them on a regular basis. Instead, we use the modeling system: when
TNT changes the URL of a manifest by appending a new `?v=` query
string to it, this system will consider it a new URL, and will load
the new copy accordingly.
Fun fact, I actually have been prototyping some of this stuff in a side
project I'd named `impress-media-server`! It's a little Sinatra app
that indeed *does* save all the files needed for customization, and can
generate lightweight lil preview iframes and images pretty easily. I
had initially been planning this as a separate service, but after
thinking over the arch a bit, I think it'll go smoother to just give
the main app all the same access and awareness—and I wrote it all in
Ruby and plain HTML/JS/CSS, so it should be pretty easy to port over
bit-by-bit!
Anyway, only Alt Styles use this for now, but my motivation is to be
able to use more-correct asset URL logic to be able to finally swap
over wardrobe-2020's item search to impress.openneo.net's item search
API endpoint—which will get "Items You Own" searches working again, and
whittle down one of the last big things Impress 2020 can do that the
main app can't. Let's see how it goes!
Poking at the site, I didn't love that clicking any of the NC items on
the homepage took a few seconds to load cuz of the OWLS request taking
a couple seconds.
If the request were faster to load I might decide otherwise, but for
now, let's just keep that cache long.
Another approach we could take would be to ask for an endpoint that
returns all the values at once, so we could cache and update them all
together, instead of having it all split into separate cache keys!
