NightWind's Card Searcher

Performed this search (plus a couple of others) and got the following:

217 - Cherry

Buy from personal stores
Public store ? @ 144 ea
masamunemaniac 36 @ 39 ea
karl17 86 @ 39 ea
bubbleman 9 @ 40 ea
Lelouch Britannia 2 @ 45 ea
Tamdrik 41 @ 50 ea
Zeku 1 @ 69 ea
King Bagbuss 1 @ 75 ea
Dark King of All Weasels 1 @ 100 ea
jellyman 3 @ 100 ea
Vroum 1 @ 100 ea
Kennisiou 1 @ 110 ea
gest13 2 @ 120 ea
merlinok 1 @ 150 ea

218 - Cherry

Buy from personal stores
Public store ? @ 294 ea
Holiday Spirit 46 available
masamunemaniac 36 @ 39 ea
karl17 86 @ 39 ea
bubbleman 9 @ 40 ea
Lelouch Britannia 2 @ 45 ea
Tamdrik 41 @ 50 ea
Zeku 1 @ 69 ea
King Bagbuss 1 @ 75 ea
Dark King of All Weasels 1 @ 100 ea
jellyman 3 @ 100 ea
Vroum 1 @ 100 ea
Kennisiou 1 @ 110 ea
gest13 2 @ 120 ea
merlinok 1 @ 150 ea

Seems to be copying Summoner Cherry's results over from whatever the previous card is (as shown from this search, which is just Chookie and Cherry).

Cherry on her own just gives a blank space.

EDIT: Manual check of the stores output says that there are zero Summoner Cherries on the market (Piro's the only guy that buys the card anyway).

Ah, thanks for letting me know. ^_^

I'll see if I can fix it over the weekend. With the details you provided I have a clue of where it's happening...

Bug has now been fixed.

masa, can I ask you to retest the special cases to see all are still working? I've modified the code that is pretty central to the whole card searcher... Thankies.

Would it be possible to code in a search for price range? Like, cards that lie between the price of X and Y?
I'm thinking not, from the way in which the system currently works, but one can always hope.

And done... ^_^

Can you please test thoroughly here? Thanks.

Tried it out by searching prices 1000-2000.

While that does indeed work, it still shows all cards. So if a card doesn't happen to have a card in the price range, it'll show, but say no sellers found.

EDIT: Figured I may as well mention that if no price is inputted, and you click show store results, it works as normal.

(12-13-2008 11:10 AM)Jessica Stryker Wrote:  Tried it out by searching prices 1000-2000.

While that does indeed work, it still shows all cards. So if a card doesn't happen to have a card in the price range, it'll show, but say no sellers found.

Yes. That is one of the technical limitations. This is the best I can get it - the price search can only fully work when used in conjunction with additional parameters.

There are essentially 2 subsystems in my cardsearcher: the card database and the personal stores. The database contains what you would see in the csc. The personal stores subsystem parses the datafeed.

Because the datafeed is not stored in the database, then filtering by price cannot happen until after the cards have been picked from the database. In this situation it means it will retrieve all 999+ cards and then apply price filtering.

(12-13-2008 11:10 AM)Jessica Stryker Wrote:  EDIT: Figured I may as well mention that if no price is inputted, and you click show store results, it works as normal.

Good to know.

And it's only now I think I realised what Haplo really wanted and meant in his post. (I'm not too good at this without examples).

Haplo - I can't code the "only search by price regardless of cardID etc" request. So would you rather leave the system as is on the main site or would you like to have the "price filter after card filter" feature added?

Edit: On second thought - I just thought of another solution. Price only search (irregardless of parameters) is codeable - yes. Hmm... must be your lucky day Haplo. ^^

when can we expect the card searcher to be updated to match the new balance changes?

Now.

awesome. thanks guys.

You're welcome Nolder.

---

I will be reupdating my card searcher when I get the data.

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Still working on price search.

Cardsearcher has been updated to include the newest holiday and trophy cards.

Price search testing

Test site here.

As per Haplo's request, I've coded into my card searcher the ability to search by price. You can test it out here. Please let me know if there's any bugs with this (or any other section). I've also made it so that the sellers table doesn't wrap over for a 1024 resolution. Oh and from a usability perspective, yes, I know that the "yes/no" options aren't consistent, but I don't have enough time to care about that now. With the little free time I have, I would rather work on functionality than appearance.

Haplo: Is this how you wanted it to work? Please let me know your thoughts.

Jessica: The price search function should now not return all cards, but just only the ones which have a personal store selling price that falls within the range.

All sellers are listed for the particular cards so that you can know of cheaper offers if they exist.

Well... for me the search won't work. (it just sits there with "waiting for users5.nofeehost.com")
The one time I did manage to load a page I got this error message:

NightWind's CMC Card Searcher Results (Can now buy direct from personal stores)

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0107'

Data size too large

/nightwind/test/results.asp

Size of data being sent in the request is over the allowed limit.

Oh I see - hmm... maybe the query's getting too large. Let's hope this can be fixed. If not. I cry.

I know that it works if you enter a price range of 30000 - 40000.

It doesn't yet work with a price range of 20 - 40.

What price range did you use?

Meanwhile, I'll see if I can fix it and upload a new version. Will let you know when the new version is up.

Meeps. Just noticed a formatting issue with sellers of card # 1071 - Raindeer. The buy button doesn't appear. Will look into that later as it isn't a showstopper.

Okay a few things.

Second test site

The code cannot and will not handle "find all less than" or "find all more than" searches.
It will now only handle a price range search (alert boxes added). This is because if we were to search for only those less than say, 20, it would return a large number of results. Same goes if you were to search for those above 20 or 40 or whatever. Think of it this way: a large pile of counters when divided by 2 will still result in large piles either way. With such a large number of card results, the code will timeout. The server I'm on isn't the best in the world. More about price ranges below.

Price range will have to be reasonable
A price range of 20 - 40 would result in a timeout
A price range of 20 - 25 would return results
A price range of 30000 - 40000 would return results

Let me know of any price ranges which cause timeouts, but you feel that they are important to warrant a fix attempt.

Hopefully, you'll start to notice the emphasis I'm trying to make - it's not the actual price range which can cause a timeout, but rather the potential number of cards that are returned.

If you do suffer a timeout, try reducing the difference between the highest and lowest price till you get results. If you want a large range of results (which I'm not really sure why you do), try to split it up into a few sub ranges for the search. The server that this is hosted on is in no way a fast server - it's just minimal enough for free users like us.

Timeouts and the like
If you do suffer a timeout, there's no need to worry - you didn't crash all the servers or anything. The nofeehost servers automatically reset themselves every few hours, so if anything bad does happen the impact isn't too lengthy. If the server does happen to go down, you will notice that the search page (default.asp) doesn't even load at all. There could be a possibility that something of this severity could happen. If it does, let me know.

Debug mode
Currently, the second test site is in debug mode. I will be turning off debug if and when I move it to the main site. This mode lets you gauge how many cards are returned before the code crashes.

Misc
Haplo - what price range did you originally search with that caused the timeouts? This info will let me know if I'm attacking the right problem.

Haplo - Also, can you let me know what you're going to use this feature for? Is it to search for expensive cards? Balance data? Curiousity? Statistical analysis? Knowing the intended purpose might let me code this better to suit you.

Everyone who reads this - What would you be using this feature for? Will you be using this at all? I will need to see if this is feasible enough to move onto the main site or should it be dropped (as this code does run a risk of reducing uptime for others).

I will still need to look at the bug with with Raindeer card and seller results. Looks like it's got fleas.


(Dammits I lost my post! Must control anger... ><)

There could be some things I forgot here.

I think the query getting too large is the most likely problem.

A search for 1000-2000 wielded this result:

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0113'

Script timed out

/nightwind/test/results.asp

The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeout or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools.

Also tried a 30000 - 40000 search which worked as it should (with the hide no sellers box checked)

Hmm... a pity it can't work straight off but I do have a workaround...

1) Search 1000 - 1500 (returns around 115 cards)
2) Search 1501 - 2000 (returns around 112 cards)

There could be some overlap where a card is sold for both 1500 and 2000 by 2 people, but sadly, this seems to be the only way on such a server. But at least you get to see who's selling what.

It seems to cap the SQL "cardid OR" results at 200 cards or something. I'm not one with SQL expertise... so that's all I can do.

Oh and you can combine these price searches with the rest of the form, but the range problems still apply

Alright. The price range I used last time was between 0-100

(Price range 1-100)
440 cards returned. Crash.

Pah. After many more tests,
I found the limit to work with 253 cards (421-1000)
and then not work with 222 cards (420-1000)
(421-1001) works though... 253 cards.
224 cards returned with (421-1100) and crash.

I can't see a pattern.

And I would use this for several things. If I only had a certain amount of points I wanted to spend, looking for cheap ass cards, and seeing if people had put a card in their store for the price i asked without entering their store and waiting an hour for the page to load. Why must everything so good be so hard.

I have to say that I'm really out of ideas for this one. I don't know how to get around this technical limitation, nor do I have any remaining tricks up my sleeve (what sleeves? ). And yet, price search is a really good idea - "value adding" in the business sense. But with the knowledge I have right now, I don't know if I can make this work. Tell you what, I will keep on trying when I can, and hopefully one day it will work, but I'm not going to guarantee anything. I have other matters in my life to attend to, but will still leave the sandbox3 site running in case anyone wants to try their luck. I'm not moving this to the main site unless you want me to - as it's quite a showstopper. I'm not giving up on this, just going to allocate more time to the other things in my life. I hope you can understand my feelings. :)