XML-RPC questions

[murklins]

It's been a long time since I worked much with the LJ XML-RPC interface, and I'm not really up to date on how the DW interface differs, but I'm trying to make a one-off migrationy script to download all of a community's entry URLs and their associated DW tags and add them to a Delicious account as tagged links -- basically create a tagged Delicious index of the entire comm. I have a couple of questions about the information that is returned by a call to getevents.

1. Is there any way at all to get the system-recorded UTC post time of an entry? The eventtime value is the user-specified post date and time, not the date and time actually recorded by the system when the entry was created. I feel like this should be an easy value to get hold of, but I just can't see where.

2. For entries that were imported to DW from another journaling site, the poster value returned by getevents is that of an OpenID account, and looks like ext_110540 or similar. Is there any easy way of mapping it to the offsite user's name & journal system, like the way it gets displayed within Dreamwidth? The only way I can think of doing it is looking up each one's profile page like so: http://ext-110540.dreamwidth.org/profile

And then scraping the string I want out of the page's html. So, possible, but not really ideal.

Thanks for any answers you can provide!

Comments

[exor674]

1. There seems to be no way to get that through the protocol -- I coulda sworn there was too, but it's not exposed.

2. http://ext-110540.dreamwidth.org/data/edges, 'displayed_name' is generally the offsite username + journal system ( well, it's the identity URL, but yes ) -- note that that *can* be changed, but by default, it's what you need.

[murklins]

1. D: Oh well.

2. GREAT! That is such an improvement over page scraping. If it's been changed from the default, that's not a big deal -- it will still probably be better than ext_etc.

[pauamma]

http://www.livejournal.com/doc/server/ljp.csp.xml-rpc.syncitems.html - I think that returns the logtime, not the event time.

[exor674]

Oh, there! But that might not be the logtime of the entry, it could be the update time, not the posted time.

[pauamma]

True.

[murklins]

Thanks for the link! I did look at that, but I definitely prefer slightly inaccurate create times to totally accurate create times mixed in with update times. Inaccuracy is not a big deal for this script, in the end.

[pauamma]

Fair enough. But it may be a good idea to return log time (server-based creation time) and update time separately. What do you think?

[murklins]

Ahahahah, I totally forgot that I was posting in a DW comm, not an LJ comm. There is such a vast difference between asking "what can I do?" and "what should we do?" Yes, I definitely think returning log time and update time separately would be a good idea.

[pauamma]

Can you post a top-level entry asking for opinions on that change? There may be subtleties of client protocol backward compatibility (or usability) that may bear on the spec (or suitability) of that change, and the more eyes on it, the better.

[murklins]

For sure! I'll do that when I get home today.