WarcraftRealms.com

Sorry if this has been discussed or explained somewhere here already, but i could not find answer in the FAQ.

When submitting collected info, does the file have to remain in folder for continued updating?
Or can it be deleted, so that next time new data will be only in new file and old, already submitted data wont get to be resubmitted?
If the file remains, and the mod will continually add collected data to it, the submitting also takes every time longer due to growig filesize.
Is that what for the "Prune" button is for?

Also, when i checked the content of the datafile, i noticed this mixed up portion with the dates. What is the cause of this, why are they mixed so irregularly? Wouldnt it be logical to add new info to the end in growing dates?

Upon thinking about it, i realize that by deleting it would nullify the ability for user to keep updated track on the realm ingame with the mod.
Maybe this could be done with 2 separate data files, one for ingame mod info and second for uploading, that could be deleted after "use"

1. If you remove the file from the folder, it will get replaced for a new one since it doesn't 'exist' in the addon startup.

2. It will get larger, but there is a self pruning option in CensusPlus.lua

--
-- Prune times if we have too many
--
CensusPlus_PruneTimes();

3. Don't know about the times, but there's a definate method to the madness.

the purpose of a 2nd file wouldn't be practical since you're just uploading the same file (which should be in the same location)

I don't think the game allows you to create 2 separate lua files. At least I haven't seen any mod that does this yet. Its always one saved lua file per mod.

If Rollie wants to ease the pain on the servers then perhaps a program like Uniuploader could maybe scan your lua file before uploading and make it much smaller by sending only the data that you didn't send before in the previous update. That is if Uniuploader supports such a thing.

This process will obviously cost more time to the end-user and depending on how fast their system is could result in less submissions because people will not be wanting to submit as often or just don't bother due to the amount of time it takes to scan your file.

If your a heavy census person and keep track of multiple realms then you can do your part by pruning your data often. If your just tracking one realm you too can help by pruning often but the biggest time consumers seem to be the ones that census multiple realms and have files with a size of 10mb or larger.

I like to initially do a prune of 7 days. when I'm not ubercensusing different realms and multiple factions for a while i do a serverprune. tidbits on informaiton on keeping your filesize down

kala wrote:
Also, when i checked the content of the datafile, i noticed this mixed up portion with the dates.
What is the cause of this, why are they mixed so irregularly? Wouldnt it be logical to add new info to the end in growing dates?

I don't know a lot about lua, but I do know that the main data structure is something they call "tables". They are basically nested associative arrays. Even if the keys are numeric, it is still an associative array. This means that there is no way to store a "sort order" into the array.

For wow addons, you create a table (a data set) for your addon. When the game is closed, it automatically serializes all of your data, and writes it to file using its own method. That serialization method does not do any type of sort, and from what I've seen, it seems to completely randomize the order every time.

Every time you enter wow, that whole file is read into memory, and then written back out when you exit. Even if the addon does nothing for the whole session, the entire file will be written again, and the order will completely change. All addons that I've messed with are like this.